The Dame's view

Prior to the start of the Transat Jacques Vabre Ellen MacArthur spoke to us about her campaign with Roland Jourdain

Impressively, despite stiff competition Roland Jourdain and Ellen MacArthur have been leading the monohull division of the Transat Jacques Vabre on board Jourdain's Sill et Veolia since the boats left Le Havre on Saturday.

Jourdain's red Marc Lombard design Sill et Veolia seems to have gained some reliability following the disaster soon after her launch last year when her keel had suffered from a phenomenon called 'flutter', a harmonic resonance that would build up in the foil ultimately vibrating it to pieces. Jourdain had been forced to pull out of The Transat while Lombard and the boat's structural engineers worked to fix the problem. Her carbon keel foil was beefed up with additional uni-directional carbon fibre but half way through the Vendee Globe this too had developed problems when Jourdain noticed a black material oozing out of the foil, forcing his retirement.

Since then Sill et Veolia has been fitted with a new steel fabricated keel foil and - touch wood - this seems to be behaving itself. "The bulb is the same, but it has been a hard year, because it was very expensive to break the keel and get a new one," Jourdain told us prior to the start.

For Ellen sailing with Jourdain, an old friend despite nailing him in the OSTAR and the Vendee Globe in 2000, is a nice break from campaigning her 75ft trimaran B&Q Castorama. Following her time aboard Kingfisher, the Open 60 is a boat she is very familiar with, and a smaller, less stressful animal to sail than her trimaran. Significantly the Transat Jacques Vabre is a two handed race whereas all her major sailing recently has been done singlehanded. We put it to Ellen that returning to the Open 60 must be akin to stepping out of a heavyweight bout into the welter weight, a holiday almost.

"It is not a holiday because we are going to push really hard and we’ll give everything we can because it is the only way you are going to do well," she says. "Everyone is going to finish knackered - that it is just the name of the game. But it will be nice to be able to have someone there, so that even though you might be woken up at least you can sleep soundly. More than anything else, having someone to have a laugh with even when things are going wrong makes a really really big difference - you just don’t have that on your own."

Equally refreshing is that there seems to be no sinister commercial motivation behind her from sailing on Sill. "I'm sailing with Bilou because I wanted to race with him. He is a nice guy and he asked me. I didn’t say 'yes' straight away because I had to see if it fitted in with my B&Q commitments, but my reaction was: 'it is Bilou, so it will be great'."

One of the reasons for the duo's success on the water at present is perhaps the training they put in prior to the race. "We have had a good two months to prepare the boat and have had some quality time out on the water. It is a great boat and one that has already proven its potential - more than anything I am really just enjoying this experience. I feel we are as prepared as we can be - it takes time to re-adjust to another boat but I think that Bilou and I have a good relationship and we will both bring different strengths to the race."

In the present Open 60 fleet Sill et Veolia is one of four new generation boats built to compete in the 2004-5 Vendee Globe. Compared to her sistership Jean le Cam's Bonduelle, Mike Golding's Ecover and Jean-Pierre Dick's Farr design Virbac-Paprec, winner of the race two years ago, Sill et Veolia has had a new keel and been taken out of Vendee trim but otherwise doesn't appear to have been as optimised for the TJV as her competition.

"We stand a good chance for sure," said Ellen. "Our boat is proven, she is pretty quick. You have not got to break your boat going out of Biscay and you have got to not have a shocker at the Equator and not get stopped behind the islands [the Canaries]. In the monohull fleet it is definitely harder to make a comeback than in the multihull fleet. In the monohulls you have the Equator but on the monohull course everyone crosses it in pretty much the same place and there is no real reason to go miles away."

The Doldrums crossing for the monohulls on the direct route to Salvador de Bahia is very different from that of the multihulls who have to round Ascension Island in the south Atlantic, requiring a more easterly crossing. Ellen still seems to be smarting from the race two years ago (it is nice to catch a glimpse of her competitive streak) when she was racing with Alain Gautier on board the 60ft trimaran Foncia and they were nailed at this stage of the race.

"We tried to play it safe, we were just behind Belgacom and we wanted to make the right call. They went further west and Alain and I said one evening after the last position report, ‘right, that’s it, we’re going to go for it’. We pulled ahead and took miles out of Belgacom. At that point we were 300 miles ahead of Groupama and then Groupama goes straight through the Equator to the east where all the GRIB files said there is no wind although occasionally, yes, you can get through but it is down to luck. They could have equally have not got through, but they did and they gained loads of miles and came through the Equator with a much better wind angle and were much faster than the boats to the west. And that was a bit frustrating - obviously because they won! It wouldn’t have been so frustrating if they hadn’t won… But to see someone pull back 300 miles through luck was pretty tough, so I think from that respect the monohull course is a little bit better."

Obviously Ellen has spent a lot of time on her Open 60 Kingfisher, a 2000 generation boat, while Jourdain's Sill et Veolia represents the latest thinking in the class. "It is quite different, more powerful," Ellen says of Sill. "Bilou has a slightly different way of sailing. It heels more but Bilou says that’s what the architect recommends."

The big news in OC Group, as we must now call Ellen and Mark Turner's company, is the recently announced Barcelona Race, which like the TJV is a two handed event. Is racing offshore doublehanded the latest trend in the sport? "I don’t know. I don’t think solo will ever go away and it will always remain special," says Ellen. "Two handed races have always been a bit of a novelty until now. There haven’t been too many of them. So I think the profile of two handed racing is rising. The good thing with racing two handed is you use the same boats as solo, which is a huge strength because you are not trying to create a new fleet of boats."

While this may be true, it seems likely that some skippers who are serious enough about winning the race will build a new boat tailored specifically to it. Whether these will be so significantly different to the solo style of Open 60 remains to be seen and it is up to IMOCA, the Open 60 class association to ensure that this doesn't happen.

One aspect IMOCA will find it much harder to control are budgets. With their Barcelona Race OC Group admirably hope to unify solo offshore sailors with those used to sailing offshore fully crewed, typically in events such as the Volvo Ocean Race. The latter group are used to working with much bigger budgets. For example some of the leading Open 60s in the Transat Jacques Vabre are running old sails, while would be all but unthinkable for this latter group.

Preventing crews from spending what they want on campaigns is virtually impossible but Ellen believes it is down to class rules to try to inhibit this as much as possible.

With this Ellen and Bilou are whisked away to continue their deluge of TV and radio interviews, photo shoots, etc but this is not before we are treated to another insight. Ellen unpeels a banana, snaps off a yellow length and then squeezes it. "I bet you didn't know that if you squeeze a banana it breaks into three segments?" We look on impressed. "I learned that from making my banana sandwiches on the school bus."

How can you not love this girl?