No more ice

Ocean racing veteran Gordon McGuire finally throws in the towel with the Southern Ocean. Read on...

Frozen and exhausted, Gordon comes off watch.

You look at your watch, and there is five minutes before the end of your watch and you think "I'm over this, I just don't need this in my life". And all the time the guy on your shoulder is going "up five, up five, down ten, down ten, oh my God, up five". And I say, "please leave out the expletives, just give me the numbers because "oh my God" doesn’t help anybody.

And all the time, you're doing 25 knots, the hammer is down fully, you are just rocking down. You are just thinking, "if we hit something bigger than six or eight feet across, then we will compromise the hull and go down".

And then you pop out the other end of it and there is no more ice - there is no more anything. All you can see is this 500-metre circle round you, it's misty and by this time, the sun is down. It's five to, and the other watch is coming up and you go down below and you take your gloves off and your feet are frozen and your hands are frozen, and you just curl up in your bunk and you just pretend you're not there. And I don't need to do that anymore - I'm over it.

After that, we got to Cape Horn, and we all promised we would never go again, and we were sailing in very pleasant conditions on the way to Rio when the rudder fell off. We can speculate that may be it was caused by hitting some of the ice, it might have fractured it, but to be honest we were still pushing the boat hard for almost a week before we contacted any more ice. We really don't know until we get the boat out of the water and have a look at the rudder to decide how it broke.

That was devastating because we were about to move into second place overall, we had a really good inside passing lane on the fleet and we were very excited about it, and then bang, off comes the rudder. We managed to sail the last 1,200 miles with the emergency rudder hanging out the back with a lot of effort from the crew to balance the boat and try and make it go in the same direction. They are very difficult to steer without the designed rudder. You put on a little plate at the back and it’s really not the same.

But we've come in sixth, we're lying either third or fourth overall - I haven't looked at the points now, but I do know that we are three points from second place which is not that far away. One leg can turn it around for us.

This race is all about ups and downs and we felt that that was a definite down for us. But we've dealt with it really well, we brought the boat home, we've finished, we've got the points, maybe the next leg will be an up. Who knows?

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