So near but so far

American Jonathan McKee discusses how he so nearly won the Mini Transat

If it were a fair world, Jonathan McKee would now be now well on his way to recovery following a well earned caipirinha-fuelled post-Mini Transat victor's drinking fest. Unfortunately the only part of this which has come to pass is that the American double Olympic medallist is in Salvador along with his boat, both having arrived by truck rather than by sea.

In the early hours of 11 October McKee's Team McLube was leading the Mini Transat fleet, 100 miles ahead of the nearest competition. More east than his competitors he was also on a better angle to make the Brazilian coast at pace. Everything was looking good - until disaster stuck.

"It wasn’t really that dramatic," recalls McKee of his boat's dismasting. "I’d been sailing for about three or four days, once I got through the Doldrums, upwind or just cracked off in 12-20 knots in moderate seas - good sized waves but not extreme conditions at all. At the time it happened there was 15-18 knots and really quite normal trade wind sailing, although upwind - I’d been going upwind for a long time and I’m sure that adds up.

The incident occured at about midnight when McKee was asleep down below although he says it wouldn’t have mattered if he'd been on deck. "I could feel the boat come upright, and I went up on deck and saw that the mast had broken off at the first spreader."

The failure was in the top termination of the port V1 shroud. All that remained of the mast was a 10ft high stump still supported by the D1. It was of course the middle of the night, the top of the mast was slumped in the water with sails and rigging in a complete tangle. "A lot of emotions and thoughts go through your head right at the moment," recalls McKee candidly. "First and foremost - you are out of the race. Then pretty quickly you think about ‘I’d better take care of this mess here’. And your third thought is ‘what happens now? How do I get to shore somehow?”

At the time Team McLube was still a long way offshore - around 400 miles from Recife. "For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to get the rig on board rather than just jettisoning it," continued McKee. "I don’t know if I was thinking of saving the parts or if I could use something. I was thinking about Yves Parlier, but unfortunately I was in the middle of the ocean with no calm place to go to, so I couldn’t pull an Yves unfortunately!"

It took McKee a couple of hours to drag everything on board, it taking all his strength to recover the broken part of the spar, to get the sails off and to get it all lashed down - and all this in an uncomfortable swell.

"So then I just slept for a couple of hours," picks up McKee. "I put the sea anchor out so that I wouldn’t drift too far downwind. Then at daybreak I got up and tried to figure out how to do a jury rig. What I ended up doing was taking the boom and hoisting it up as far as I could on the stump of the mast. The hardest part was holding it upwards because all the halyards and sails and everything wanted to pull it down. You couldn’t just lash it because it would just slide down. So I ended up having to put some Wichard hooks into the slots in the mast, where the halyards exited and used those to hold the boom up."

The resultant jury rig was just 18ft tall above deck. "I had a good little platform there but it wasn’t long enough to use the Solent even in a reefed form. So I had to tie a knot in the top of the jib to make it shorter and run it out the pole part way to get enough luff length. Because I was still going upwind, the jury rig had to be pretty close winded and needed to have some luff tension. So I got the jib so it worked, then I set the storm trisail and then the next day I upgraded it a bit and got the main back in operation with three reefs, so that was an improvement. Then every few hours something would break, a halyard would saw through, etc so I had to periodically stop and rebuild the jury rig. It was pain, but it kept me thinking..."

McKee says his mood swung with the wind direction. "The wind was quite headed. Sometimes I would be heading for Salvador when I got a lift and then I thought, okay maybe this is not so bad, I can finish. Then other times, the wind would come more from the south and I wasn’t making it to Brazil at all."

Two other boats in the leading pack also dismasted in the closing stages of the race. Sam Manuard took over the lead from McKee and like the American looked set to win the Mini Transat right up until the penultimate day when his rig came tumbling down too when the D1 broke. "He didn’t even have a stump to put a jury rig on," says McKee. "I don’t know if it was the same termination, but that is where it is most likely to go. His was almost brand new. My mast had done the race before and all this season, so I am kicking myself that maybe I should have replaced all the rods. But it is a funny thing - sometimes they are good for a long time and sometimes they’re not. I don’t know if it’s that or if it’s close to the edge - everything seemed so solid. But then hindsight is 20-20!"

Getting to Recife under jury rig, McKee says it was hard to remain motivated. "You have been so focussed on the race and your mentality has to completely change, because now you are just trying to get to shore. There was still a chance I could still finish. Granted at that point there was no way I could make it around the Fernando de Noronha waypoint - I was about 150 miles short of them at the time. And I only had shrouds on the port side, so I couldn’t really sail on starboard tack."

McKee says that he could possibly have sailed on port, but would have been under mainsail only and making only one knot. "It would have been pretty painful and with what the weather subsequently did there was no way I was going to make there anyway. So it seemed prudent to just stop and head for shore and not worry about being too heroic."

An additional problem when approaching Recife is that he didn't have charts of the entrance and had to rely on the Admiralty pilot and sailing directions from the Mini Transat to find his way in. "It was a little bit dodgy getting in there with the limited manoeuvrability that I had…" Fortunately he came away unscathed. "It was during the day and I found my way to the only yacht club in that part of the world where some people helped me and we found a truck to take the boat down to Salvador and everything came together."

Turning the clock back a little and McKee says he was pleased at how the race had been going up until the incident.

"Tactically I tried to just stick to my game plan which was pretty much down the rhumb line. I took a little move to the east on the third day but there were a couple of big shifts on third and fourth days which worked out pretty well for me. I got a big westerly shift, which I’m sure everyone got, but instead of running low with it, I heated up and used it to really go fast. So I was going 10-12 knots for the better part of a day, slightly high of rhumb line, but using the shift to go fast rather than go low. The next day I got a shift the other way going to the east and I did the same on port tack. I think it was those two shifts and really using them to leverage out rather than running low with them that seemed to be the period that I really extended the lead.

"Then it was tricky, once you get close to the Cape Verdes, to know how to handle that. As soon as I got there the wind totally died for several hours and I wasn’t sure if it was dead for everyone or what was going on. I had determined the slot through the islands that I wanted to go through, again quite a Rhum line course through the biggest gap in the islands. I know some guys avoided them by going west or east, but I was middle of the road continuing to play the shifts. So I was really focussing on the shifts, because that’s the one thing you know you can control - you don’t know if there is more wind to the west or the east, all you can do is sail the shifts you have. And it was consistent with what I know how to do. What I don’t know how to do is predict what the wind will be doing 200 miles away."

Crossing the Doldrums McKee says he was a bit lucky. "I had a good lead going into the Doldrums so I don’t feel to bad about being lucky coming out. I was heading for a waypoint that I’d decided on in advance so I had a game plan which I was continuing to follow. My goal to get to 28degW and I was heading for that but the Doldrums were a long way north - at 8.5degN, so I was a little east of where I had planned to enter the Doldrums, but I was still heading in that direction."

Of his entry into the Doldrums McKee says it all happened quite suddenly. "One minute I was heading downwind at night and the next minute I got into a big cloud and the next minute, it was take the spinnaker down and you’re going upwind. So there was a couple of days in the Doldrums, mostly with light southerlies at that point."

He says the Doldrums weren’t as bad as he had anticipated, except for the first hours there was some wind almost all the time albeit upwind in a light southerly. "You had to chose whether to be on port or starboard tack. The goal was to get as south as you can at that point, but you couldn’t do that. So I chose basically to stay on starboard tack that was the slightly favoured tack to go south and the consequence of that was that I came out of the Doldrums quite far to the east, which turned out to be great. I knew if I could exit to the east it was going to be an advantage later in the race because when the wind came southeast then I was going to be more cracked off than the other guys which is exactly what happened."

Once out of the Doldrums he was in great shape. "You would periodically get these lifts but I was potentially cracked off the entire time once I hit the southeast trades. So I was doing 6.5 knots, still pretty much upwind, and I think that was how I was able to stretch out so much was because most of these guys were fighting for height and doing 5.5 knots not 6.5 knots. And my boat is good in those conditions too, that sort of medium to heavy upwind. So it was perfect for me and I knew if it became a little more reachy then that was going to be good conditions for Sam [Manuard]. So I felt I had to take the advantage of the period that was upwind to stretch my lead, so I was working pretty hard."

Speaking to McKee he doesn't sound to disheartened as a result of his dismasting. "I’ve had enough time to come to terms with it all. I guess my attitude is pretty good now. I was really happy with how I was sailing. I had put myself in a great position and really there was not much that was going to stop me from winning the race. I know that. Everyone know that… That stuff happens, it’s okay. It would be great to have true closure and win the race, but throughout my life I’ve just had so many good breaks and good things happen to me that when something like this happens you have to be philosophical about it."

Going on from here McKee believes he may have sold his Mini to a Frenchman. He then returns to the US where he is to become part of the crew of Randall Pitman's new radical 93ft Ed Dubois-designed maxi alongside his brother Charlie and a number of other former OneWorlders. "It’ll be fun to be part of a team again and it will be nice to paid instead of having to pay…"

McKee says that he hopes the Mini Transat will not be the last solo offshore racing he does, although it does take its toll. "I really enjoyed it. I had a great time - not just this race, but the whole year. I did show some aptitude for this kind of thing for whatever reasons and I enjoyed my time on the water - I wasn’t sure if I would but I really did. So it is hard to walk away and say ‘no, never again’. But it is difficult on the family too - for my wife, and I have one child now and another one coming. This whole adventure wasn’t so easy on them. It is quite an ego-centric sort of thing to do and you have to be a bit careful about that. But if someone came along and handed me the keys to an Open 60 I’d certainly have to think about it!"