Assa Abloy's Neil McDonald dockside in Baltimore

by Volvo Ocean race media on 18 Apr 2002 Q: How was the leg?

A: It was particularly tough out there. I think we always knew it was
going to be tough but the spread of the boats shows how tough it was and
we had some really difficult clouds and people gaining and losing a lot
and the Chesapeake Bay proved to be exactly what we thought it would be.
Light, difficult and opportunities to gain and lose a lot. We made the
gains we needed to in the last 20 hours of the race.

This morning I think we were quite fortunate. We kept the wind and I
think the leaders ran out of wind and I think we were in a good position
to make a gain and make it stick.

Q: Are you exhausted, were you stressed?

A: There were some pretty long faces onboard yesterday. We had done very
well on the first part of the race, we had executed our plan, we had made
a reasonable start and we were leading for the first day and a half. It
is quite hard to lead as you have to look out for everybody and
essentially we did not sail very well. The middle part of the race we
lost a lot of ground. Very frustrating, very disappointing but that’s
yacht racing, but it’s good to be here now having had a real battle.
Today has just been a long, hard, gruelling day and to beat illbruck at
the end was just what we needed.

Q: What happened at the start?

A: It was one of the most bizarre starts I have ever seen in ocean racing.
We got stuck in and we were always aware that people could be over. One
of our goals was not to be over, and Chris (Larson) did a great job not to
be over and that is what put us in good shape.

Q: How do you feel about staying in second place?

A: You can never do enough! We would liked have won. If we had won and
illbruck had come fourth then we would have been looking really sweet, but
we’ve done what we could and there is still three legs to go and we’ve
just got to do what we feel we can do best. Keep battling, battling and
battling.

Q: What went wrong in the middle when you lost the lead?

A: Bad positioning, clouds. We always talk about good and bad luck and we
felt we had bad luck in the middle of the race. Under one particularly
bad cloud yesterday morning, we lost 15 miles in two hours, which is very
frustrating. We got out of positioning, got into a bad eddy in the
current and lost a lot of ground, which we never really made up, and I
have to take my hat off to the two boats who did incredibly well. Grant
and Jez; they did a great job to take opportunities and make them stick.

One the things I think our programme has shown is that we are going to
keep pushing to the end and it does make a huge difference. We could have
easily come back yesterday and said, ‘twenty miles – we’re not going to
catch them’ but we always thought ‘this is a strange place’. We spent
last weekend looking around up here and I think some of those things
really paid off. We had a couple of new sails, which we developed
particularly for these light, flat water venues and it made a huge
difference.