Getting back to basics

49er bronze and former OneWorld mainsheet man Jonathan McKee discusses his plans to race the Mini Transat

Jonathan McKee is one of those annoyingly talented yachtsmen who seems to have been able to combine a highly successful sailing career while having an entirely separate professional life.

McKee won the Flying Dutchman Worlds after only a year in the class and went to take gold in the 1984 Olympics aged just 23. Then after a significant 16 year gap when he concentrated on his career as a contracting and building appraiser from his home town of Seattle, he went on to take bronze in the rather more athletic 49er at Sydney. Since then he become a 'pro sailor' and was a paid-up member, along with brother Charlie, of Peter Gilmour's OneWorld America's Cup campaign as mainsheet trimmer. Following his two year tenure at OneWorld McKee is now following the route of Nick Moloney and Andrew Cape in getting back to basics. How to do this? Simple - do the Mini Transat.

"It is something I’ve dreamed of doing for a long time," says McKee. "It just happened that this seemed like the right time as this campaign [OneWorld] was ending to do something totally different. So I decided to go for it. I think there was an article in Seahorse about five years ago that I saw and looked at those boats and thought ‘wow – that looks awesome’ and some ideas just percolate in the back of your mind…"

This is no idle day dream. McKee has purchased - sight unseen - the boat in which Brian Thompson came sixth in 2001, a well sorted Simon Rogers design with an innovatiive keel that both cants, but also can be move fore and aft in the boat.

Brian Thompson aboard his Mini



Surprisingly for someone who trained as an architect McKee says he is not really interested in in the technical side of the Mini class. "I’m most interested in the sailing part of it. I’ve never been particularly technically-orientated. I’m interested in having a well prepared boat, but my focus is not coming up with some technical breakthrough. I’m really just interested in learning how to sail the boat well and the human challenge of it."

Andrew Cape and Nick Moloney both used the Mini to rediscover their enjoyment of sailing after prolonged periods with large teams be it Whitbread or America's Cups. "There is certainly some element of that at the moment," admits McKee. "When you have been part of a 100 strong team for two or three years, you just want to get back in control of your own destiny and most of my sailing life I have been on two person boats primarily. The big teams have their ups and downs. You get to meet a lot of interesting people and you have access to a lot of technology and there’s a lot of resources. But you are only one person in a huge machine and it can be a bit frustrating at times too."

Aside from being well known for his Olympic campaigns, McKee says he has sailed a diverse selection of boats. He spent two years on the IOR50 circuit, sailing on Insatiable and Blizzard and also mounted a 18ft skiff campaign. Rather importantly for someone about to mount a Mini campaign he has also sailed offshore.

"I’ve done some, not as much as some people," admits McKee, "but enough to know what it is about. I’ve done Transpacs and a few around the world, the Fastnet and done some ocean cruising at all." On his sailing CV is the fourth leg of the Open 60's EDS Atlantic Challenge which he sailed on Kingfisher.

He agrees that his experience in 49ers and 18ft skiffs can only be an asset: "It’s got to be helpful. A Mini is a downwind overpowered skiff. So as far as the basic sailing techniques and learning how to balance the boat and control the sail plan I think that experience would be somewhat helpful."

Remarkably for a professional yachtsman he has even had his own boats and raced his own 35 footer for many years. "Yes, it is quite unusual! I have another boat now – a 44 footer I just finished building in New Zealand."

At present his Mini is in Southampton and in April he plans to come over and take it to France where he will carry out his 1,000 mile qualifier in the Med. "So I’ll do that at the end of April and then there’s about six races I plan on doing. It is a pretty full schedule and it takes a lot of time to qualify. You have to get in early to qualify, so it is quite time consuming, but you’d have to spend a fair amount of time to be properly prepared anyway."

After his qualification he will take part in all the necessary races in order to qualify for the Mini Transat - no mean feat for this heavily oversubscribed transatlantic race. Aside from the Roma per Due and Course des Lyons, his first major race will be the Mini Pavois, "which all the guys do. So that will be the first real test where all the good guys will be. I’m excited about it. It will be fun to sail in a big fleet."

For some of the double handed races he is expecting to sail with his brother. "I’m hoping we can sail together in one of the races. He doesn’t have a great interest in offshore racing like I do, but we enjoy sailing together, so it would be fun to do one. That is one of the cool things that you can do some of the races double handed so it is an opportunity to sail with some other people."

In terms of sailing in France, he says he has raced there before, so it should not be too much of a problem. He make life easier he is currently learning French. "It is getting better, but it is a struggle. That is certainly one of the challenges joining such a Franco-centric class."

Brian Thompson is likely to help him a lot (although possibly not with his French). "He’s very supportive. It is quite a tight community the Mini sailors and ex-Mini sailors – they are very encouraging of other people that do it and kind of want to see people have a good experience." Otherwise he expects to be running his campaign himself and is prepared for a 'do-it-yourself' situation.

He slightly concerned that the Mini class is more pro-amateur sailors than professionals and is not expecting to get any special treatment because of his background or because at present he looks like being the only American participant (following Gale Browning two years ago). "I plan to play it very straight. I’m not going to be asking for any favours. I just want to be treated the same as everyone else – that’s fine with me."

Looking back at the Louis Vuitton Cup when OneWorld lost out to Oracle in the semi final repechage he says he is disappointed they didn't make a better match out of it. "It was always going to be hard to go the whole distance. In the end we were pretty well matched with Oracle - we were pretty close in a lot of areas. There were some organisation issues which were going to be challenging from the beginning and then there were some outside influences which conspired against us in the end too."

Then there was the distraction of the litigation that went against them from the outset in the Louis Vuitton series. "On face value it shouldn’t have very much affect, but if it keeps going on, ultimately it is a distraction and it just takes energy away from trying to win a sailboat race. It is disappointing because we had really tried to model ourselves on being the good guys and being a clean team and doing other things in the community and we were trying to project such a different image from what ended up being projected – that was hard. Especially for someone like myself – you don’t have this control over the other stuff and you’ve worked hard all your life to maintain a good reputation, so you get caught up in that, but that’s the nature of the beast."

He says one area they were they lost was upping their game during the course of the series. "Oracle did a very good job of re-moding their boat and adapting to conditions as they got wider. They were very well set up for the conditions we ended up having. We were doing the same sort of things but in a less aggressive way. So our whole approach was fairly conservative, which is how we started out well and had a hard time making the big steps forward that some of the other teams made. Saying that I think our basic package was very close in speed to the other teams but in the end we didn’t sail well enough to capitalise on that. I don’t think we had a big speed deficit."

Going from the most expensive form of yachting in the America's Cup to sailing a 21ft skiff across the ocean singlehanded in a French race could not be more of a culture shock, but Mini-ists can look forward to racing against one of the most all round and well capped yachtsmen the class has ever seen.