The old campaigner

Grant Dalton talks about Amer One's progress and clears up a few rumours about the girls

The bronzed, athletic-looking figure who has just returned from his "Caribbean cruise" and sits before me hidden away in his Nautor Challenge portacabin in Miami, seems a little war weary.

It has been a busy few years for Kiwi ocean racing legend Grant Dalton going from The Race straight into his role as the main motivating force running a late Volvo Ocean Race campaign, not to mention becoming a father for the third time during all this. Although he is still more than on top of Nautor Challenge's two boat campaign one gets the impression that June could not come soon enough.

He has been quoted elsewhere that he is not particularly enjoying this race. "I think that's true to a point," he admits. "You live a love-hate relationship with these races anyway. I mean it is great being in Miami, I enjoy being in America, the sun's shining and it's better than being stuck in traffic down in Auckland, but I had to take some pain to get here..!"

For Dalts it is the intensity of the race, the fact that he had a bad leg finishing sixth out of eight and that as a result he is not delivering to his sponsors, that is making him feel this way. "That is the worst result I've had in a Whitbread leg in my life," he says of his record that goes back five Whitbreads. "And I don't take that easily or well."

"This wasn't a good leg for us," Dalton admits. "This in many ways was a watershed leg for us. Many campaigns reach a point in their lives where they either get better or they get worse. In our case I think we're there because of this leg through a speed issue. In retrospect we could have done this better, done that better tactically, but basically we were okay. The only real move on the whole leg was when SEB cut the corner, getting in front of a wave that was coming. So I think we have a pretty serious speed issue". In other words he feels his Frers-designed VO60 is slow.

He says that Amer Sports One not being on the pace came as a complete surprise to him. "When I left Rio I was quite confident that we were in for a biggy. I felt power reaching we were pretty handy. We'd never power reached alongside anyone before, other than our own boat [ Amer Sports Too] and then we were good". He believes there is no point of sail where Amer Sports One is quicker than the Farr boats, but power reaching under headsail and particularly if there is any seaway - he is adamant - they are slower. "The Farr boats are popping a bit quicker on the waves," he adds making a popping noise and an explanatory coming-out-of-a-wave gesture.

Dalts says that he thinks he was completely wrong about how he read his team's form back in September. "I look at the race to date now, and I ask 'why were we where we were' and I think we came out of the blocks quite a lot stronger than I thought out of Southampton. And now those campaigns that were a bit sleepy for the last three months are actually catching up. I thought we'd be playing catch up and actually they're catching us up. Assa and Tyco had a shakey start and are now getting in their stride and they're beginning to feel like winners".

On the next four legs he believes that their performance will either go up or down, but it won't stay the same. He gives the impression that it is more likely to be the latter, although knowing Dalts this may be him continuing the same sort of underdog talk we heard from him prior the start of the race.

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