The legend, Steve White, takes eighth

Incredible result for Toe in the Water skipper who brings his Open 60 across the Vendee Globe finish line

Finally triumphing after suffering prolonged easterly headwinds in the Bay of Biscay, British solo skipper Steve White sailed his IMOCA Open 60 Toe in the Water across the finish line today at 12:38:55 GMT to take eighth place in the Vendée Globe.

On its fourth circumnavigation, Toe in the Water's time for this Vendee Globe was 109 days 0 hours, 36 minutes and 55 seconds. On a course some 1,200 miles long, this is getting on for three days faster than Josh Hall managed in this Finot-Conq design as Gartmore Investment Managers back in the 2000-1 race. He was greeted back in Les Sables d'Olonne by his wife Kim, and his three sons Jason, 19, Isaac 9, and Euan 6.

"It will take some time to sink in what I have done I suppose, but at the moment it just feels like I have been on a long sailing holiday,” commented White on his arrival. "I never thought that I might not finish, there were some difficult times when I had to deal with different things on the boat, but you do what you have to do. At times it was frustrating with an older boat to keep it going, but also I was very lucky.

"The result? It’s incredible in some ways. You don’t like to think of others who did not make it, or to feel you have profited because someone has broken something or their boat is upside down, but it is a race of attrition. The people who pulled out are all really, really good sailors, and so I had a real battle with that, I would rather have come where I come than see another boat upside down or dismasted, to see someone elses dreams shattered at my expense. I would have been quite happy wherever I should have come. There are a few people I felt I should have beaten come what may, and I would like to have been closer to Cali [Arnaud Boissieres] and to Dee [Caffari], but the weather deals you the cards you get."

This result is much more than the grounded, unpretentious father of four, from Dorchester in Dorset, imagined when he set off in November. While others were in peak fitness and had up to three or four years of planning and training behind them White's last minute preparations had left him on the verge of exhaustion as he left for the start, surviving a first horrendous storm on adrenalin, his wits and considerable seamanship skills.

Professionally White trained as a jockey before he took to sailing, got into the sport 12 years ago with his friend Richard Heaton who needed someone with a towbar to get his plywood 17ft Lysander to the water. Slightly typically White ended up driving home in his boxer shorts. The pair taught themselves to sail in a dinghy, the Invincible which a rudimentary sail which was simply a triangle cut from a caravan awning. Richard has been first on each of White’s new boats and was an essential part of the shore crew in Les Sables d’Olonne back in November.

White's father was an engineer with Rolls Royce aviation. He recalls that from a very young age, around four, Steve had a predilection for taking things to bits and putting them back together. And as he got older his mechanical and engineering skills graduated through lawn mowers, motor bike and cars. Latterly he was a specialist car restorer, working with pre-war, high value vintage Rolls Royce and Bentley cars, accomplished in every area from coachworks to fine tuning engines, before the sea infected his blood.

He transferred his skills to a local boatyard in Weymouth where he learned more about composite boatbuilding and repairs, before working for more than three years with Pete Goss where he worked on the ill-fated Team Philips maxi-catamaran and other projects. From there he went to work with Chay Blyth’s Challenge Business – alma mater for fellow competitors Mike Golding, Dee Caffari, Jonny Malbon - where he worked his way up from being crew to a training skipper. Over the four years he was there he did more than 24 trips to the Fastnet Rock and set the fastest time on the Plymouth to Boston Challenge Transat. His vegetarian food was left behind and he survived on potatoes and eggs for the trip.

White’s fellow skippers from the Challenge Business days have always been fulsome in their praise, not only for White’s seamanship skills and determination, but his ability to get an extra half knot from his boat in many circumstances.

A long night’s discussion with wife Kim saw them decide Steve would pursue his solo racing career seriously. They drove to Plymouth and handed in his notice with Challenge Business and that afternoon arranged the charter of Mark Taylor’s Open 50 Olympian Challenger, max-ing out a fistful of credit cards to make the payments and pay for his entry to the 2005 OSTAR, landing a small sponsor on the morning of the race.

The deadline was down to a matter of 15 minutes when he finally purchased the Open 60 from Josh Hall which has taken him around the world.

At 1145hrs on D-Day he had all but decided Hall’s midday deadline was not going to be achievable, but a chance phone call from Shally Suri, a Nottingham chemist shop owner who had sailed as a Challenge crew with White as skipper, who agreed spontaneously to be guarantor to the required loan and just after midday he was confirmed as owner of his Vendée Globe Open 60.

Right up to the start the prospect of him being able to compete in the Vendee Globe remained in the balance. When he arrived in October in Les Sables d’Olonne three weeks before the start not only did he not have the money to race, but he was on the verge of losing the family home and his Open 60. The morning before he arrived at the Vendée port with the then Spirit of Weymouth that he got the news that a promised sponsorship had fallen through.

While he was doing the passage to Les Sables d’Olonne his wife Kim had to borrow enough money to get to London to get his children’s passports. But on the return train journey she was breaking the sad news to the kids that not only was the Vendée Globe project off, but they might end up living somewhere else, when she had the call that a private individual would support them in the name of the Toe in the Water injured service personnel’s charity.

White recalls: “It was a bit of an incredible day really, but we have always been positive. We have never really known brick walls stop us and just kept going and going. The voice at the end of the phone just told us to just get on and get the boat ready and he would take care of everything.

As soon as he had the promise of money he had to squeeze a three month re-fit into three weeks. Even on the morning of the start, as Dee Caffari led the fleet out on her immaculately prepared Aviva, Toe in the Water looked more like the aftermath of Boy Scouts’ jumble sale - stores and equipment piled improbably high on her decks - and White was almost at his wits’ end with his team stowing materials until the last seconds. Software for his computers was loaded on the way to the start.

Despite the pre-race handicaps of lack of funding and preparation time White's circumnavigation has been impressive since the first Bay of Biscay storm which immediately accounted for four boats. He has always pushed to his limits in all conditions, light moderate and strong winds, consistently re-affirming that he was out there to race hard and be competitive. That he outlasted many more fancied, highly seeded skippers is down to his prudence, seamanship, sailing skills, keeping on top of the regular maintenance as well as being able to deal with the one bigger issue which might have ended the race for other skippers - when his gooseneck broke in the Southern Ocean.

White's engineering and electronic skills stood him in good stead. In every respect he is the true self-sufficient soloist, proving himself able to deal with the intricacies and possible frustrations of re-wiring and rebuilding his aged autopilots, regularly reporting back to Race HQ having spent hours under his chart table of Toe in the Water in the desolate Southern Ocean, stripping and replacing slender wires of the dimension of
human hair to resuscitate his fickle pilots.

He started his race by having to bring his very essential computer keyboard back to life. Were it not so potentially serious, there was almost a comedic moment when he reported that he had melted a generator hose and shorted out his battery box and had a fire which filled his boat with a mix of acrid burning black carbon smoke, and a steam and diesel fumes some three days into the race.

In the Pacific Ocean approaching Cape Horn he also dealt with the fiddly business of repairing his mainsail headboard cars, removing and replacing dozens of tiny ball bearings. But his biggest success was the complex and ingenious repair to his gooseneck - which joins the mast to the boom - which required creating a composite support from laminated battens, which was secured to the keel head by dyneema lashings which passed through holes he drilled in the deck and kept tensioned by a Spanish windlass. In reality his repairs were occasional but fairly regular but in between he proved himself extremely able to drive Toe in the Water hard and fast, several times in the Big South, White was the quickest in the fleet over 24 hours.

Along the way his humour was irrepressible, sometimes quintessentially English schoolboy - with his "Crikey!", "Cor!" and 'I'm dying for a beer' - while his keen, often wry observations made his blogs both informative, and entertaining, always on the right side of self indulgence and always written with wide-eyed spontaneity. While others either ripped blithely through the Southern Ocean dealing with familiar territory or simply struggled with it, White positively loved it and says that his sailing will never be the same. He remained patient and level headed throughout, well able to stay on top of his emotions, save perhaps Christmas Day when he missed his kids and was frustrated with not being able to push his boat hard enough.

Yesterday when asked what he would be celebrating with upon his arrival White said a few bottles of Theakston’s Old Peculier and a home cooked vegetable stew. White is possibly the first vegetarian to have completed the Vendee Globe.

His race has drawn widespread praise from fellow skippers and his regular, often humorous communications from the engine have made him one of the most popular characters in this race.

Eighth place will be a just reward for White who has moved mountains to be in this race. Typical of his determination, he arrived in Paris in the summer for a Meteo France weather briefing for all the Vendée Globe skippers, and had so little money that when he spent his few Euros getting the train in to the wrong part of the City, he had to walk two and a half hours to the other side of Paris to get to the venue. He had already prepared himself to sleep rough in the adjacent park afterwards, before Brian Thompson offered him a floor in his hotel room and gave him a lift back to the airport.

Since the Pacific White has been talking consistently and clearly about he plans and his desire to move on from this race, seeking a newer, faster boat and a budget which allows him to race on an equal footing. White's Vendée Globe has been not so much a Toe in the Water as one huge step in the right direction.