Why did Jeff Scott walk?

The Kiwi Volvo veteran puts the record straight on why he left a buoyant News Corp campaign to join djuice

Clean living guy...

Selecting the right sails for a leg is a real art, and is a compromise between covering every eventuality and sailing heavy, or leaving a few sails on the dock and hoping the weather conditions don't leave you wishing you'd brought them along after all.

"You can't cover every area," says Scott. "We broke the Code 5 just a couple of hours into the Gulf Stream and that absolutely hammered us. Basically after that we had a jib top or a runner, so we had a 35-degree difference in the angle we could sail. So were forced to sail up one side of the Stream and then up the other, and we did a load of zig-zagging. If you could have pulled that line straight we'd have done a whole lot better. A Code 5 would have sent us straight down the middle. You saw that with illbruck - they sailed that bit of the leg to perfection."

It wouldn't be surprise to see djuice adding a new type of sail to its inventory for the next leg. Scott believes a little fractional reaching spinnaker has been a key part of illbruck's success in certain conditions, including the early stages of the Gulf Stream on the last let.

"The little A9 is about 190 square metres - illbruck's got one and News Corp's got one - they are really, really fast in 23-24 knots. You can just wind them on and you're really, really quick. The good thing about them is you can maintain speed. You go on your big mastheads and you go up and down all the time. You're over on your ear and you don't get much acceleration. You wind the thing on and then a puff hits and all of a sudden you're 30 degrees below course.

"Those little sails, you just wind them on and leave the sheet cleated and just play the main - unbelievably quick. There's a power sailing technique where you just cleat the reachers off and steer the boat to keep it on the plane. You throw it round and it's a pretty brutal form of sailing but it seems to be fast. With the bigger reachers you tend to drop back to 14 knots and then up to 25 - with the little reachers you tend to hold a steady 19 knots and really maintain a high average - and that's what it's all about."

But even if Scott can help get djuice's sail plan in order, doubts will linger over the Laurie Davidson hull design. As one of the few sailors to have raced on both a Farr and Davidson boat he is well placed to comment, and he sees some real virtues to the pink and black boat.

"You can peel spinnakers in 40 knots - we were doing it on the leg over here. It's not any more forgiving but just being able to get on the bow is different. With the Farr boat you get hit in the nose by the spray, with this one you're much drier. You don't drive the bow in as much in the gusts - it's a good boat in the heavier stuff."

Which begs the question why djuice didn't put in a better showing in the Southern Ocean, but as Scott says, things aren't always as simple as that. It will be interesting to see if an altered sail programme - and some much rumoured changes to the afterguard - earn a reprieve for Laurie Davidson's much maligned design.

Scott will be doing his level best to contribute to a djuice renaissance, but after that he's promised he really is hanging up his sailing boots. What, then, does an action man do when he's not conquering oceans? "Fishing charter tours." That will come as no surprise to anyone who knows how madfor fishing Scott is. He wasted no time after flying home from Rio in getting stuck in to some big game fishing, and he caught a marlin. "The one we landed was 111 kilos, and just the week before I came out here I spent nine hours on one, a big blue about 300 kilos, but I lost it off the back of the boat after nine hours." The question is, has sailing really lost Jeff Scott, or will he back for a fifth go at this event in four years' time?