On the pace

Brian Thompson talks Andy Rice through his epic Mini Transat race

Right up to the last few miles of the second and final leg of the Mini Transat, Britain's Brian Thompson was headed for a famous victory across the finish line outside the Brazilian port of Salvador. But at the last gasp, Yannick Bestaven sneaked up the coast inside Thompson to take the leg victory and the overall prize.

Thompson was disappointed, but he reckoned he had received his fair share of good luck back at the Doldrums when he stormed into the lead of the Mini fleet.

"My aim was to punch through the Doldrums as quickly as I could, and so I aimed 20 degrees off the rhumb line to head south. I thought I'd be the furthest east in the fleet, but I later found out I was the furthest west. I couldn't believe it." Unlike other races like the Volvo Ocean Race, where competitors track their rivals' every move on the six-hourly position reports, the only information that the Mini sailors have of their rivals' progress is their distance to the finish. They know nothing of their longitude or latitude, and Brian incorrectly assumed that he had taken the lead by heading furthest east of the fleet. He was furthest west of anybody, little did he realise.

"I went through the Doldrums about 30 miles to the east of the route the Volvo boats took recently, and yet most of the fleet were even further east than me." With no weather routing instruments and only the most basic of forecasts from the race organisers as their sole source of outside information, Thompson has come to the conclusion that the secret to Mini racing is to play it close to the rhumb line. "Anything off to either side of the rhumb line is a gamble because you don't know what the weather is going to do next, and you don't know where the fleet is."

Thompson said it was like racing around an Olympic triangle in a day race, but in thick fog. "It's like you are told where you are lying in the fleet as you round each mark, and yet you have no idea where your competitors are in relation to you." Never was this more the case than through the Doldrums. As it turned out Thompson took one of the longest routes through the Doldrums, although this was by no means the plan. "It lasted about 300 miles for me, although I think the reason why my route ended up working was the fact that I never stopped. Boatspeed never really dipped below 3 knots, whereas it was more stop-start for other people," he concluded.

Thompson used Commanders Weather for weather routing information before the start of the leg, and Thompson expected to join the Doldrums at around 8 degrees North and exit them at around 3 degrees North. "Then the onboard weather forecast said the Doldrums would end at about 5 degrees North, and I remember thinking even after the first day of the Doldrums that I was nearly out of it. You'd sense a change in the conditions and think, 'Great, this is it,'. And then you'd find you were still stuck."

The next weather forecast then said the Doldrums were now stretching to 4 degrees North, and eventually Thompson found himself exiting the Doldrums as he had originally expected - at 3 degrees North. It was a long and tortuous passage through this tricky stretch of the mid-Atlantic, but at least he was in the lead.

"You can never get too much sleep in the Doldrums because a squall can hit you so quickly. In the day it's easier because you can see the wind when it's five minutes away. I'd roll up the gennaker right as the squall hit and then put a reef in the mainsail, and then I'd be making 8 to 10 knots for an hour or two under mainsail alone." But sailing at night was harder, with visibility down and the need to be more alert than ever. "You can never relax with the Code Zero up because it would blow out as soon as the squall hit," he said.

Turn to page 2 to read about Brian's gunnel bum