Girl wonder

The Daily Sail caught up with sailing phenomenon Ellen MacArthur to discuss her Jules Verne attempt

Getting an interview with Ellen MacArthur is a tough business these days. With celebrity status on both sides of the English Channel, demands on her time are high and one gets the impression that she has had so many microphones and television cameras shoved in her face since the fateful day she crossed the line in Les Sables d'Olonne that she'd happily never do another again. But then again she is sponsored and even she couldn't resist the lure of The Daily Sail.

With a phenomenal win in the Route du Rhum recently under her belt, MacArthur has now stepped into a rather different challenge with her attempt on the Jules Verne Trophy record for sailing non-stop around the world aboard her maxi-catamaran Kingfisher2.

An attempt to set off yesterday morning was scuppered when a section of track on the mast was seen to have become noticably worn. Since arriving in Plymouth last night a team have been working around the clock to replace the track at the height of the headboard car when the mainsail has two or three reefs. With a full-on northerly gale blowing, working on the mast is tough even in the confines of Plymouth Sound where they are currently anchored, but the team are optimistic that they may be able to get away tonight or tomorrow morning.

MacArthur is loathe to predict how long she thinks her non-stop passage around the world might take. The benchmark, at present, is Bruno Peyron's time of 64 days 8 hours 37 minutes and 24 seconds set aboard this same boat last year.

"It is so hard to say because the perfect trip never happens," MacArthur told The Daily Sail. "You can't guarantee the weather. For the first week maybe, but after that no way. And Bruno had pretty good conditions - he had some bad moments but he had some good moments as well. The weather is never going to be perfect. It is always going to be swings and roundabouts so you've got to understand that. Sure, if you had flat water and 25 knots of breeze on the beam all the way round the world you could do it in 50 days, but that's not what we're going to get."

She thinks 60 days is a more realistic prospect, "but that is on the very lucky side and at the end of the day you've got to get round if you're going to make it." To be fair Peyron's attempt last year was the first in one of the new generation G-class multihulls and he was exceptionally unlucky with the weather outbound and inbound in the South Atlantic and tackling the Azores high at the conclusion of the attempt.

The biggest challenge facing MacArthur looks likely to be from Olivier de Kersauson's Geronimo. Now two and a half weeks into their attempt, the big tri is already more than two days ahead of Peyron's record. Ellen thinks her campaign has advantages over de Kersauson's. "We haven't tried to do anything really different," she says. "We've just tried to make everything that was there more reliable and a bit lighter. We know that that works, we know that the concept works - it's already been twice around the world - and we're relying on that as much as anything else. If you look at Geronimo, she went off and she didn't make it [last year], she came back and she had quite a few problems, but yet she's a new boat and they're still learning. We're a little more tested in that respect and a lot of the guys who're sailing on board have sailed her in her old configuration and that helps..."

Kingfisher2 has a wealth of experience in her crew. Among her 13 men and one women, seven took part in the last Volvo Ocean Race, one - Neal McDonald - as skipper. There are also countless Jules Verne record holders, none more capped than her weather beaten watch captain Herve Jan who originally sailed with Olivier de Kersauson's Sport Elec crew, then on board Orange with Bruno Peyron as well as being with Grant Dalton on Club Med for The Race. Impressively this will be Jan's eighth circumnavigation. In Guillermo Altadill, Neal McDonald and Herve Jan, Ellen would be hard pressed to find more rock solid watch leaders, to run the three watches of four, while she and cameraman Andrew Preece stand out of the watch system.

With the experience in the crew - not just of the course, but of the boat - three of Kingfisher2's crew, Herve Jan, Ronan le Goff and Benoit Briand, went round on Orange - Ellen says she is not too concerned that they haven't had a great deal of training.



"It helped enormously to have all the guys who've sailed on the boat before," she said. "We were never going to have as much time as some of the other projects before the start - we knew that so we put in place people like Albert [Neal Graham] who've been awesome and Ollie [Allard] and Johnny [Mordant] who've been awesome working on the boat. They've taken it on to another stage."

The longest the team have been out was for a three day windward-leeward up and down the Bay of Biscay. "I think every time we've sailed we've had 40 knots. And 40 knots in one of these is not much fun!" says Ellen of their training runs.

One of the fundamental novelties for MacArthur will be sailing with not just a crew, but such a large and experienced one. Fortunately these days she seems to exude confidence but thankfully not in a cocksure know-all sort of way. "I'm going to learn a terrific amount, but you always do," she says. "I'm not going in there telling everyone how to do it. Sometimes the weight lies on your shoulders, but equally you're a team and that's how we'll sail. You don't do it on your own. Far from it - it's the other end of the spectrum."

Ellen will be spending much of her time at the chart table, where she shares navigational duties with Canadian crewman Kevin McMeel. "We'll have to have a line of communication for sure," says Ellen of how they will make decisions on board. "There's weather and tactical decisions to be made. I'll talk to Meeno [Schrader] and Jean-Yves [Bernot]. I'm primarily using Meeno with Jean-Yves as the consult, but I will speak to Meeno every day. He's done routing for quite a long time. I went over to Germany to see him and he's got a really awesome set-up, some great information. I've worked with Meeno for two years routing Kingfisher, so it is not like it is not a new experience on that front. I'm really impressed with him."

Although she is best known for sailing her Open 60, Ellen has spent a lot of time as crew for the highly experienced Alain Gautier on board the 60ft trimaran Foncia and so has learned from one of the masters how big multihulls should be sailed. "I think the fact that I've sailed with Alain on the tris helped enormously," says Ellen. "When I started sailing on the tris, you're completely sailing on the limit. When you get to sail on the tris it is quite an eye opener. And I think it is good to have been through that."

The Foncia experience has certainly helped her make the transistion to a boat with two hulls, almost twice the size of the original Kingfisher. "It is very powerful, very fast," Ellen describes the big cat sailing experience. "You don't have the same feeling of going fast like you get on the 60ft tris, which allows you to go faster, but equally you have to be careful because it is easy to push them too hard, because you don't have that same feeling of power as the tris."

She says that you have to work more to the polars of the boat, because they are different to what she is used to. "It is all very different. You have to think far more about that than you do on a monohull because you are going so much faster," she says.

At present Kingfisher2's sole function in the Offshore Challenges program is to make the Jules Verne Trophy attempt. "As far as the funding is concerned, we've only got funding to do this," says Ellen. "I'm sure the boat will go on to do The Race, but with Kingfisher we don't have funding to go on after this. It was always kind of a one hit, just go and do it... We didn't have a two year project to prepare for this, we just wanted to do as best we could." For contractual reasons she doesn't think it would be possible for her to take part in The Race with another sponsor.

Having seen the degree to which Ellen was fired up prior to the start of the Vendee Globe, she does not seem to have quite the same degree of passion and enthusiasm for her latest venture. She seems more happy and confident than anxious and nervous, probably both signs that she is older - albeit still just 26 - and more mature, with a very large number of serious yacht racing miles under her belt now.

"It's always been something I've followed and when I came back from the Vendee I knew I wanted to go into the South again," she says when we ask if the Jules Verne holds special significance with her. "The next Vendee was 2004 - quite a long way away - and it was another challenge to go and do it with a team and it was something I wanted to do." Pausing for a split second for thought, she adds: "But you never do a race like your first Vendee."

So how does she rate her prospects, particularly with Geronimo storming ahead? "It is a difficult question. I have never sailed on Geronimo, nor with the people who are sailing on board so it is very difficult to make a call. They're sailing well, they've been going quickly and they've had fantastic conditions. Whether we'll have as good conditions who knows? But hopefully we will have given ourselves a good shot with this weather pattern.

"With regards to the boat, I think we've got guys who know how to sail them - which is good. We haven't sailed the boat as much we might have done, but with the amount of sailing that has been done on this boat previously, we're up there. It's always a plus to do more training, but I think we're okay. You're always learning, and we'll learn things on the way."

At the end of the day whether Kingfisher2 sets a new Jules Verne Trophy record is in the lap of the wind Gods and assumes that they have no major catastrophies. In both respects at least, it is familiar ground for Ellen and if all goes according to plan we rate their chances highly.