Never give up, never surrender

madforsailing gets up to date with Mike Golding as his newly remasted Open 60 returns home

While he will be able to fly giant downwind sails now, Golding still feels there are a lot of gains to be made to their upwind performance. "We're concentrating most of our effort on improving our upwind performance," he says. "That's a bigger struggle. We made big gains last year, but we could make more. We're nowhere near where we could be. I'd like to change the daggerboards again. That would solve the problem overnight. We extended the daggerboards by 0.5m last year. We extended the existing boards so they went higher aspect. The cheapest solution to us last year was to glue a bit on. It was a cost thing and I wanted to see that that was the problem. And it definitely was. You need more daggerboard and that's it. Simple as that." While they increased the draught of the boards, he feels they should now make them wider (fore and aft) too.

"Then we said okay, we're going to pay a little penalty downwind because we're carrying a little extra weight. But I'm increasingly starting to believe, that going upwind the hull is just stopping the rig from sinking and it is the foils that matter - they're doing all the work and it's the foils where you've got to concentrate your work. Because the keel isn't a foil anymore, it's a beam. You're trying to reduce drag, but that is the only reason you want to treat it like a foil." When you have a boat with a canting keel, it requires a major rethink of the role of the foils.

With Ecover back in one piece and ready to sail this week, Golding's sights are now firmly set on the Route du Rhum, where he will be up against his old adversaries, Roland Jourdain's Sill and Ellen on Kingfisher as well as new players such as 2001 Tour Voile winner Jean-Pierre Dick on Virbac. "We're obviously going to be able to use the time to sort out some of the systems and to try and make the boat as reliable as possible. The answer now is to do a lot of sailing and get the reliability up. We haven't done enough sailing this year. So we need to put a few thousand miles on the boat."

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Ultra-beamy Open 60s like Ecover are no longer the vogue in the class.