"I'm wet.."

Alex Thomson describes conditions at the front end of the Transat Jacques Vabre monohull fleet

"I’m wet..." is Alex Thomson's opening pleasantry to us when we spoke to him over the satphone earlier. "We have a really good routine going. We spend as much time on deck as possible. And then go and lie on your bed for a little while and get smashed up and down until you get bored and go back out again. I haven’t really been to sleep yet. It is really nice for me to be out here. I am in my element. I love being up on the foredeck in 45 knots of breeze and being washed down it."

Sill, the Lombard-designed Open 60 Thomson is sailing with the boat's former skipper Roland Jourdain is currently lying in second place some 16 miles astern of race leader Mike Golding's Ecover.

There passage so far has been fairly incident-free for such breezy conditions aside from some damage to the hull sustained on the start line when they were hit by Didier Munduteguy's 60eme Sud. "He had no rights barging in and when he realised he wasn’t allowed to do it he turned his wheel hard over and his stern smashed into our bow," claims Thomson. Munduteguy was in fact over at the start. "Just after we got around the first two buoys I ended up hanging over the side of the boat sticking Sikaflex into the hole. It seems to have sealed up. It is not through both skins or anything. The hole is a bit bigger than a tennis ball."

The first hours of the race were pleasant with the boats sailing upwind, albeit into an unpleasant seas. "Got into a hole for a little bit and we were just shaking a reef out when the new wind hit us so we immediately put two reefs in," recounted Thomson. "And the wind very quickly built from there, with a very very nasty sea. Bilou and I ended up on the foredeck with the ORC jib and both of us got washed down the deck and Bilou got a little cut in his hand and it was a bit of bleeder." This took place around midnight liast night.

"Then we nearly hit a ship," continues Thomson. "We had a real close one. We had the strobe light on, our nav lights on, our ActivEcho [radar] on and he just kept coming straight us. He probably passed a boat length and a half from our port side. We had to do an evasive bear away."

Late this morning Sill, tacked on to starboard, although this was some hours after Ecover. "The front went through and it has taken us a while to get the shifting breeze. Literally about 10 minutes ago it seems to have come in and we are on course for Ouessant, blue skies, it’s not very warm, but we are hitting our course. It was pretty horrible earlier on." At the time of our conversation the wind was 35-40 knots from 245-250deg and they were sailing under double reefed mainsail and ORC jib.

"I think in the next few hours you’ll see everyone coming this way. Mike has pretty much got the edge on everybody upwind, except for one sched last night when we took a couple of miles out of him. So he is obviously pushing the boat hard which is…interesting. For everyone looking ahead for the next 3-4 days, it is going to be like this or similar…25 knots apart from a little bit in the middle and I think everyone is going to be holding it back a little bit to try not to break anything."

Tactically at present it is all about being able to lay the west side of Ouessant and this, plus the moment at which boat choose to tack on to starboard, will dictate the positions over the next few hours. "We are only just making Ouessant now. If the wind comes round even more which it shouldn’t do, then Mike will be quids in, but if he has to tack he will look very ugly on the other side. We very nearly tacked back again. We looked at the tack for about an hour and ummed and harred and then the breeze shifted. So we did the right thing. So it will be interesting to see if the wind comes round a bit. It’s not due to."

Aside from the pleasure he takes from toughing it out in such conditions Thomson is enjoying sailing with his French co-skipper. "It is very pleasant to sail with someone who only has one mood - which is happy. Even after being holed at the start, within 30 seconds of it happening he had a big smile on his face and we were off again."