Leopard MacArthur shows true colours

Stuart Alexander joins the crew of a sailing leviathan for a rough ride on the Solent's turbulent waters

When a cold, 20-knot wind rises to 30 as you punch into it at 10 knots and the stinging rain is pinging your face, the irony of rounding a fading yellow and blue buoy called Colonna Club, Antigua, is not gentle. There was nothing Caribbean about the atmosphere in a grey eastern Solent off Portsmouth yesterday, but the ability to endure it was made all the greater by knowing you were on the biggest yacht strutting its stuff in Cowes Week and watching the likes of the Olympic gold medallist Iain Percy and singlehander Ellen MacArthur come to grips with a new challenge.

Mike Slade's 92-foot Skandia Leopard is around £5million worth of fast cruiser and makes most of the honest endeavour on its more ordinary brethren look like doing the Cresta Run on a tea tray. This, by contrast, is a big bob with stabilisers.

The first thing to come to grips with is the joining of the Leopard family and, more particularly, the Slade style of family gathering. The first of these takes place as the yacht slips its mooring off Cowes Green, includes introductions to the new faces, and is followed by the daily presentation of the glasshouse trophy, a very naff male doll dressed as a boxer in the sort of dome which usually houses a clock.

It went to the crew boss, Chris Sherlock, who was so busy waving to interested onlookers that he failed to notice water that had collected in an awning until he was soaked through. He recovered enough to run both the cockpit and the foredeck operations and then to supervise all the packing up.

Before that there had been rather more worrying alarms as the committee boat organising the start for the big boats invited them to a starting line in water so shallow that Leopard nearly ended up on the beach. The yacht needs 16 feet of water before it can even float. Using the keel to plough a furrow in the gravel was not the intention of its designers, Reichel and Pugh.

As if that was not wake-up call enough, the loudly expressed thought by Ellen that the guys might be sailing like a bunch of women galvanised a few egos. Which was good, as they had to react quickly on the second leg of the race when $20,000 (£13,500) of spinnaker ripped itself in two. It should be repairable, but even the normally unswervingly genial Slade was grouchy for a moment.

After that, it was just a question of powering their way round, Percy calling the tactics, taking the helm for a while, and working out new systems of communication for the crew of 20.

He then handed over to MacArthur, who is never happier than when mucking in with the others and was unhappy that she may leave without saying hello to everyone. She steered the final third and the trip through the finish line to take the gun for the first yacht home.

Then the handicapper had his say and the overall position slumped to next to last at 18th, while Richard Loftus ran away with the principal prize, the Bathsheba Trophy, in his old Swan 65 Ketch, Desperado.

The organisers were also in authoritative mood after the mayhem caused by the brisk breezes of the day before. They ordered everyone to wear life-jackets and cancelled many of the day-boat races, even though the forecast of 40 knots of wind never materialised. The average was 18 to 22, but 20 boats who failed to obey the directive were pulled over on the finishing line.

* There was bad luck for Roland Jourdain in the French Open 60 Sill, when he dismasted on the first night of the fourth leg of the EDS Atlantic Challenge from Baltimore to Bristol, leaving Kingfisher, skippered by Nick Moloney, leading the remaining three yachts.