Vendee warm-up

Team Cowes skipper Nick Moloney, sailing his first Open 60 solo race, describes his traumatic first day at sea

Nick Moloney is currently racing Ellen's former Kingfisher Open 60 called Team Cowes in the Defi Atlantique, singlehanded race from Salvador de Bahia to La Rochelle. Despite having raced in the 1999 Mini Transat and campaigning the Open 50 Ashfield Healthcare to a class win in last year's Route du Rhum, this is Moloney's first ever solo race in an Open 60, his first true preparation for next year's Vendee Globe, for which Offshore Challenges are still trying to hunt down a sponsor for him.

The first 24 hours of the race have not been without their problems. A wrap in the genoa during the first night created a small split in it and Moloney has been up the mast attempting to fix it.

"I have been up the mast a couple of times today to try and make repairs to the genoa that ripped on the first night. But every time I get up there I suddenly see a fleet of fishing boats ahead or other shipping so it is too risky to stay up there in case I have to alter course. The sail has a tear on the back of the sail along the leach [outside edge of sail] at about the height of the first spreader. I need to unfurl the geneo a bit so that I can reach it to make the repair which will need some sticky-back tape and stitching. The sail was ripped on the first night after a bad furl - I then had to run downwind to re-furl and when I unfurled her again the tear was there. It has been frustrating because we are not sailing at our optimum having to use the solent...but hoping to get up mast again later today to try and make the repair. Having Jo-Jo [Sebastien Josse] right on my stern is a comfort in case I encounter any problems going up the mast."

The main cause of frustration when we speak to Moloney is over the positions - the Inmarsat C polling throughout the fleet does not seem to be working well. "We haven’t got a clue where we are in the fleet. We have got some presumptions. There has been some sporadic polling and a bit of discussion on the radio vacation this morning about some guys having problems. I have got Seb Josse [skipper of VMI] just behind me who I spoke to this morning. He said that from his communications on shore he and I had a really good night and Virbac was in the lead. We were second or third with PRB. I can see PRB on the horizon and she is probably ahead of us in terms of distance to finish. They are further east."

The unknown quantity at the moment is Alex Thomson on board Sill who seems to have taken a long eastbound tack offshore, presumably to find more breeze. It is not known at present whether she has tacked back. Yesterday's leader Mike Golding on Ecover found himself too far inshore last night and while he was in among the fishing fleet ran over a fishing net, causing him to lose his lead as he extracated himself.

At the time of our conversation Moloney was 14 miles off the coast of Brazil, still hard on the breeze on starboard under main and Solent in 11-13 knots of breeze. "I’ve been looking at this corner of Brazil the whole time, thinking ‘okay, I’ll get off the coast, when I get there because I have been on the wind the whole time and as the coast turns away the wind shifts and I keep following it around'. So it is driving me mad. But I am heading north and the finish is in roughly that direction and I’m pretty happy about that."

Moloney urgently wants to get some easting in. "Right now the tack offshore is not terrible but at the moment I am waiting for a bit more header or the lift to break me away from the geographical influence of the coast. My next waypoint is Fernando de Noronha because that leads towards a tentative waypoint I have for the Doldrums at about 29degW although I don’t have enough information at the moment on that area. I’ve only concentrated on up to the Equator, so I have no great strategy for the Doldrums. A long range forecast I did receive showed a big area of no wind in the west, so I may need to make quite a bit of easting as the breeze lifts."

Fortunately Moloney's first 24 hours singlehanded Open 60 racing are now behind him. "I'm not too bad today. Yesterday was another story: I had a terrible terrible start. I felt quite embarrassed about it.

"I set myself up for a very long approach to the start line. When everyone left in the build-up I was really cool. I practised a few tacks in the morning - I spent three days practising tacking and gybing under pilot on my own and I felt really comfortable with manoeuvres.

"So I was just approaching the line, I had in reality maybe 20 minutes on my final approach, I was just luffing, just hanging out bear headed under full main, and then I unrolled the genoa, went for the line and if I'd just gone with my instinctive timing it would have been perfect, but I just chickened out at the last minute. It was like I psyched myself out - I had too much time to think on the approach and I got really really nervous. On the way out to the first mark I went to trim the sails and my whole body felt a bit like jelly.

"I went around the first mark and I went inside Alex [Thomson on Sill] on the mark without any real rights. He was taking it wide and I thought he was out of sorts and was going to do a really wide rounding, so I stuck it inside and he turned around and he came up and yelled out “What’s this? Aussie rules?” And I went “Yeah, that is for the World Cup!” He let me in and off we went.

"Then we had to sail to the short distance mark on the wind and I picked a really fine lay line, because every boat length beyond it was just excess mileage because we were bearing away on it and I tacked on to what I thought was a good layline - it was slightly above PRB who did lay - and I went to duck VMI and VMI went to duck me, and it was one of those games of chicken - bow up and bow down and I ended up in irons and that took me ages to get out of. Then I lost the layline, fell 3-4 boat lengths short and two tacked it around the mark and ended up in a pretty poor position behind all our generation boats."

Fortunately Moloney was then able to regain some ground. "I found some legs and the boat fell into its own. A lot of guys were under one reef and Solent. Then the breeze dropped and a lot of guys were shaking reefs out and I just unrolled the genoa and I gained massively on the guys around me. I sailed past Ecover when she was shaking her reefs out and ended up in fourth position."

But having a furling genoa was to prove a double edged sword. During the first night Moloney lost more ground when the breeze picked up and a poor furl of the genoa forced him to run off downwind to unfurl and refurl it to sort out the problem. "Skills-wise I had a pretty ordinary first day solo racing an Open 60."

After all this it is not surprising Moloney found it hard to get to sleep on the first day. "The first night I didn’t sleep at all. I was laying there wide awake going ‘rest, rest, rest’. - I don’t think I slept at all. Then last night I had a really nice night. I knew I had to sleep, so I started resting in the afternoon when the wind began to stabilise. By the evening I was nodding off in 15 to 30 minute grabs and in total I may have got four hours, so at the moment I feel really good.

"Yesterday I was on a massive emotional rollercoaster through fatigue and a few things wrong - I had a ballast valve stuck open and the back tank filled up with water and I was slow and couldn’t work out why. And I did the rounds of the boat and I found it. And I wasn’t happy at all because I was on the wrong tack. So I was thinking 'I’m not being a good solo sailor right now'. Today is coming okay, but it is 100% torture on your emotions."

Moloney claims that he hasn't been waking up expecting Sam Davies, his co-skipper on the Transat Jacques Vabre to be up on deck helming. "Actually it has been quite good to have that extra room. I can leave stuff everywhere! [And he doesn't have to listen to Kylie Minogue any more]. But it is a big wake up call to all of a sudden to be on your own. A lot of the guys are saying that. Having sailing down here was good practise but you are quite reliant on the other person. Yes, we put reefs in and out on our own but you want to go up the mast, then you don’t have anyone..."