24.11.2006, 19:00UTC
PICKING UP THE PIECES
Mike Golding spoke this afternoon about his bizarre day at sea, what with the dramatic rescue of Alex Thomson followed in quick succession by Ecover's mast snapping in two places. "We're just sitting here drinking a whisky coffee and mulling over our luck," said Golding. "After the rendezvous we got going and very consciously undersailed the boat for the first couple of hours, and gradually put more sail up, got up to race speed, spent most of our time drinking coffee, eating some food that Alex had brought, yarning, catching up, doing the sort of things that two people would do after 24 very stressful hours.
"Conditions were quite settled, 22 to 25 knots of breeze, one reef in the indexsail and a headsail, and the mast exploded, about a metre and a half from the top. It just sounded like a lot of carbon exploding. A big bang. I actually saw it, I was looking up at the time. I saw shards of carbon flying off in all sorts of directions."
Asked what his reaction was, Golding replied with a question: "Why? It's not what we expected, not what we wanted, it's just rubbish luck." But 900 miles away from land in the middle of the Southern Ocean, Golding and Thomson don't have the luxury of being able to reflect for too long. They've been busy getting the boat back into a sailable state, as they make slow but steady progress towards South Africa. "We're getting the boat ready to sail, we've got two bits of mast hanging by their halyards. We're rigging up a halyard system to drop these bits down in a controlled fashion. We'll probably sail tonight with just a headsail, maybe tomorrow with a small indexsail and headsail."
One small consolation is that Ecover should not need any outside assistance. "It's 900 miles [to land], so it's not terrible, not difficult. All the components for solving the problem are here, but we're tired, it's cold, and emotionally it's a bit of a let down." And there is the small matter of having to scale the mast to sort out the tangle of mangled carbon and rigging. This is Golding's nightmare job, his 'room 101', but on this occasion he has a little helper. "The good thing about our current situation is that Alex is quite happy to do it [climb the mast]. I'm delighted to say I'm happy to wind the winch!"
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