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 “ The rest of this week I have Chris Tibbs out to do some weather with me. I am trying to play some squash and do a bit of fitness, try and sleep and stay off the beers. I am not a big believer in sleep patterns and programming, talking to Ellen, Nick, Alex, from the last few times. Alex tried that thing where you are in your twenty minute programme before the start, and I can’t think of anything worse. My take on it is, I’ll be as rested as possible, and I am just waking up when I normally would, eight o’clock. I have done nothing scientific at all. On this boat I have got into this equilibrium quite quickly.

I start with the clock on ten minutes, and know that if I fall asleep bang on the button I have got ten minutes, wake up, look around everything OK, bang back to sleep, for ten minutes, on this constant cycle.”  Jonny outlines,

“ I am concerned about managing myself, but on the Qualifying (transatlantic passage) I was managing myself pretty well by the end, a lot better than the first week and a half, when I was not eating, but that is down to confidence in the boat. I know the boat is strong and solid, and so I have confidence, but it is a massive thing managing yourself physically and mentally, that is something which I have to learn.”

 He explains where the Rogers design sits on the spectrum of different new designs:  

“ Within the design spectrum we are at the powerful end. We are probably the beamiest, except for Pindar. We have a very large wing wig, not massively tall, a big chord and big area. There is a lot of rocker in the boat, with an interceptor, so we have lots of bells and whistles. We are on top of them and know how they work, we just don’t know if they are quick or not. With more rocker downwind the boat sits up, and with a lot of volume in the bow we did not want to have the whole nosediving thing. Upwind or reaching with the interceptor the boat thinks it is longer and effectively we have seen a marked increase in speed, it is hard to quantify, but the feeling from the testing we have done is that it is very, very powerful.”

“ For me, already I have learned that she is so stable you can be so powered up, you will be leaning over, everything wound in, sitting on the chine, and you don’t go very fast. So it is going to take a lot of getting used to. I have done more sailing on the boat than the boys (shore crew) put together, at the moment, and I sail it very differently. Prime example was the Artemis Challenge (round the isle of wight). In hindsight, we’d have set off with one reef and the Solent, but we set off with all the gear up, which is against everything we have learned, but in the ‘red mist’ we were very, very slow.”

 “  With more time we would know a lot more about the boat, but there is only me out there, and so I am going to take off and sail the boat how I think, but it is a big unknown.

We are a full inventory of sails, one spare big kite because if we lose a fractional kite, then we have Code sails to fill in the gaps, but obviously VMG running we only have the big kite for that and, as we all know, the boat is not great for that, VMG running, if you need to soak them we need to have a spare, and so we have one vac (vacuum) packed.

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