Vendée Globe

Mike Golding spoke this morning about the moment he realised his keel had come off yesterday. He realised there was something wrong. He was sailing along in 22-25 knots, in very gusty, shifty conditions when the boat heeled over.
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I jumped up and released the mainsheet, and then I felt I was easing a lot of mainsheet, and didn’t really understand why. There was no real noise….no, actually there was a slight noise but it was quiet, it wasn’t particularly noisy, anyway so then I operated the keel buttons for a few seconds and it ran for a few seconds and stopped. I then went below and checked the ballast tanks and made sure there was water in the weather one and the leeward one was empty and they had not dumped the water across, and the leeward one was empty. I looked in the top of the keel and the keel was fully canted. I went on deck to the cap shrouds and looked over the side where you would see the keel and I couldn’t see the keel. It could have been murky water and I was thinking maybe it was murky water so I went down below and got the endoscope out and had a look out through the rudder endoscope fittings and couldn’t see anything forward. I could see the daggerboards but I couldn’t see the keel, but a lot of paint had been coming off the keel so consequently it wasn’t as orange as it should have been and I just thought mabe that was it. Then I looked through the escape hatch and stuck my head in the water and there was a keel, but it was at a different angle to what I had seen at the keelbox, but it was at a different angle but your head doesn’t get round that and I thought there was something I was missing, and I got a torch and looked down the keelbay. Usually when the keel is canted you can see the edge of the ‘olive’ and there should be an orange strip where the blade is and in the middle of the orange strip I could see daylight, and I couldn’t work that out and while I was there, looking, there was a larger crack and that was the keel departing the boat. It didn’t do anything. I had the sails flogging but still had the Solent drawing. I went back round the whole routine again, did every check all over again and that’s when I thought : ‘I’ve lost the keel’. I’d been on the phone to Gringo (shore manager) and I kept thinking : It must still be there, and even this morning coming in the canal I was still thinking it must still be there and maybe I am just tired and, it is just hard to accept that such a fundamental part of the boat is gone. But in truth when I started to drop all the sails the boat started to rock so badly so I put some back up because I thought if it is going to snap because of the movement, so I put a little bit back up just to stop the boat rocking and then the process from there was setting some sails. »

Mike set just the staysail to start with and in the end set a very small deeply reefed mainsail at the back just to get some balance in the boat. Building up a little speed the daggerboards were fully loaded. Meanwhile Merf Owen from Ecover’s designer had crunched some numbers and given Mike a safe angle of heel to sail at, around 20 degrees, and he set the heel angle alarm to ten degrees and then just let the speed built and concentrated on keeping the boat in balance, which improved as he loaded more ballast. In the end he was able to make reasonable speed upwind – occasionally losing Ecover 67, Mike Golding Yacht Racing’s 67 foot Challenge yacht, which was in attendance, and motoring at 9 knots. Mike revealed that as he came in he was so tired he was steering and watching his DVD « Kill Bill » just to stay awake.
AR

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