Panther's progress

madforsailing talks to an unusually sheepish Rob Greenhalgh about the Tour Voile

It was all looking so good. A two boat training programme. A cool name. Winning the pre-race. Mutterings of following in the footsteps of Adrian Stead and the all-conquering Barlo Plastics team from 2000. And so perhaps it is not surprising that there should be a slight feeling of disappointment that golden boy Rob Greenhalgh's Panther-Team GBR crew should not be more regularly taking the docklines for their French and Swiss competitors.

Currently the 'pro' British team is lying seventh overall in a fleet of 40 (including amateur and student boats) with 1101 points while the race leaders are up in the 1270s.

Speaking to skipper Rob Greenhalgh (right) in Sete last night one gets the impression he is simultaneously disappointed not to be 'doing an Ado' while talking up their performance so far. Thankfully today's results for the inshore races held off the Mediterranean port have been better. "We had an 11th and a sixth today. It was a pretty good day all round. It was pretty classic 5-8 knot Mediterranean weather. Very hot. Generally the guys you expect to see do alright in the Med did alright. Some at the top didn't do so well. We generally held our own or did better than holding our own. So we've come out of today happy. We've pulled up on the guys in front of us. One guy behind us pulled up on us."

Greenhalgh says their aim was and still is to get into the top five. "We're certainly in a position where we can get up to sixth after tomorrow and then up to fifth after that hopefully. We can get into the top five and that's what we're looking to do. The top five being fifth or fourth, fourth if we do really well. We shouldn't be below seventh I think, we just didn't do too well earlier on unfortunately." He adds that the race is "a bit of a learner really. We've learned a lot and at the moment we're on the up..."

He admits there have been problems. "We haven't made any boat handling errors, but tactically we haven't been great sometimes and other times we've been fine, and to be honest we haven't been as quick as we wanted to be - reaching we've struggled a bit. Generally we haven't been as flash as we should have been. All our training was in windy weather so anything in 12 knots of breeze upwind we're the fastest boat out there comfortably. 12 knots plus we're the fastest and if it's 20 knots we're double speed. We have seen some of that and when we have had that we've been leading."

Their sails "aren't as great as they should be" and there have been other shortfalls. "Navigation-wise we haven't been that fantastic. We haven't got on top of the whole offshore navigational/tactical side of things that well. I guess there's communication things, the chain of command, who's making decisions and that sort of thing..." There was the issue of missing out a mark during an early offshore legs.

"We've just a couple of bad races and it was all offshore. We did well in the offshores generally. We've been in sixth overall for a while but we let ourselves down on a few inshore races, just generally tactically going the wrong way and things like that. We've had a couple of offshores where we haven't done that well on and they were boat speed issues - downwind and two sail reaching. We've kind of put our finger on the problem there. When you're training in the Solent you don't go two sail reaching for 50 miles. But after 50 miles you can see your boat speed differences."

There was the unfamiliarity with the course and having to sail around what in places is an incredibly complex coastline for navigation, littered with rocks and powerful tides. "The first offshore up to Cherbourg we were leading and then it went a bit tricky and we were in the middle of France somewhere and we didn't really know what was going on and we lost out a bit."

There is also the fact that there are some competitors who are rather experienced in sailing this race, "They've all done it a shitload. Jimmy Pahun has done it 19 times or something," admits Greenhalgh of the Region Ile de France skipper - and even he is third overall.

He also has full respect for some of the competitors' ability to make the Mumm 30 go quickly. "Generally the guys who are ahead of us they're all good and they've all had plenty of experience at it - not only have they done a lot of Tours, but they've got a lot of experience in the Mumms. These are all very good Mumms sailors. If you put them in the Worlds or the Europeans they'd all be in the top five sort of thing. It's a competitive fleet and there's a lot of good guys."

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