Sailing: Passion drives MacArthur on personal quest for perfection

Britain's round-the-world yachtswoman is a celebrity in France and a sensation in Australia but a sideshow in Britain

As the warm Australian summer evening closes in, Ellen MacArthur is sitting in a restaurant with a stunning view over Sydney Harbour Bridge. She is pondering what had seemed to be a straightforward question: where is home? Is it Whatstandwell in Derbyshire, where she spent her childhood and where her parents still live? Is it Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, where she has a flat? Or is it France, where she has spent much of her time on land in recent years and where the public have taken "la petite anglaise" to their hearts after her stirring exploits in the French-dominated world of ocean racing?

"None of them. Home is out there," MacArthur says, pointing beyond the spectacular light show that is illuminating Australia's most famous landmark. "The sea. I know that may sound a bit daft, but the sea is where I feel at home." Ten years after she embarked on a career in sailing, there is no ebb and flow to MacArthur's love of the sea. Despite a year of disappointments in what had hitherto been a career of almost unremitting success - kicked off by her remarkable second place in the Vendée Globe solo round-the-world race three years ago - the 27-year-old's passion for sailing remains as powerful as the crashing waves she has braved in a succession of races across the world's most perilous oceans.

Forever in search of new challenges, MacArthur has been here this week launching her new boat, Castorama B & Q, a mighty 75ft trimaran custom-built for her to embark on a series of attempts on some of sailing's most famous solo speed records. The boat is built for pure speed as MacArthur tries to break the transatlantic, 24-hour and, in all probability, round-the-world solo records.

When you look at the 5ft 3in MacArthur on board her new monster, with its towering mast and sleek hulls, you wonder how on earth - or should that be sea - she can control the boat single-handed. When you consider some of her experiences of the last 12 months, you marvel at the fact that she is even contemplating such a challenge.

Eight months ago MacArthur was one of a crew of five sailing the trimaran Foncia in the Challenge Mondial Assistance from Cherbourg to Rimini. Fifty miles west of Lisbon, with the skipper, Alain Gautier, at the helm and MacArthur below deck, the boat struck an object in the water, knocking the rudder on one of the outer hulls out of its housing.

MacArthur takes up the story. "Alain tried to slow the boat down, but it lifted up on the wave and the rudder on the central hull came right out of the water. Effectively we were in a boat under full sail in 25 knots of breeze with no rudders. The boat started to turn round and we fell over sideways. The rudder never made it back into the water because the wind hit the side of the sails and knocked us over.

"I was down below and my first thought was that we had to find Alain. The safe place to be when you capsize is inside the boat, not outside. Alain was at the helm and what you fear in those circumstances is that he'll be trapped under the netting that stretches across the boat between the hulls. Alain was under the netting but thankfully he managed to swim out."

It might seem cruel to mention it, but the point has to be made. When MacArthur is sailing her new trimaran, she could be in the same situation, capsized and trapped under the netting - but with nobody around to help her. "Hopefully not," she says simply in a matter-of-fact tone. Well, that is one way of looking at it.

So does the prospect of danger like that not frighten her? "If you're not frightened by it you should never even dream of setting off and doing something like this. You need to be frightened. And as for what happened on Foncia, I learned a huge amount from that which has gone into the new project. You can never say you're not going to capsize, because it might happen.

"You also have to remember that the boat's been designed with a view to what would happen if we were upside down in the water. We need to know what it will be like for me if that happens." And what of the possibility of having to climb Castorama B & Q's 30-metre tall mast to carry out essential repairs? On board the trimaran in Sydney Harbour the previous day, MacArthur had watched as four of the current crew winched a fifth man towards the distant heavens to work on the top of the mast. It is a job MacArthur will have to prepare for - without, of course, any assistance.

"We've put in lots of systems that should mean I don't have to climb the mast," she said. "However, we said that at the start of the Vendée Globe and I had to go up the mast nine times. We know it will be significantly harder on the trimaran.

"On Kingfisher [her boat in the Vendée Globe] you could get your arms around the mast and hold yourself on to it. This mast is too big for that. There's a very real danger that you'll bump into it as you climb it, that you'll break a limb or smash your nose as you get thrown back into it. The motion of multihulls, because they're so wide, is very aggressive, particularly if you slow down to go up the mast."

Should MacArthur run into trouble while sailing Castorama B & Q, the one thing you can be certain of is that she will be as well prepared as anyone could have been. "I've never known anyone like her for absorbing information," says one of her team. "I've never known anyone like her for wanting to know more, to learn about things."

On board the trimaran, which on this occasion is being sailed by her crew, conversation with MacArthur is constantly distracted as she observes the on-deck activity, taking it all in. Later, sitting down below in the living area, she is all ears as the wind whistles through the rigging and the hulls scythe through the waves. "It's a completely different noise to what you hear in an Open 60," she says.

While MacArthur balks at any suggestion that 2003 brought a succession of failures, she concedes that it did not work out as she had hoped. The year finished with a disappointing ninth place out of 14 alongside Gautier in the Transat Jacques Vabre and had begun with failure in a much-trumpeted attempt on the Jules Verne round-the-world record. MacArthur and her 13-strong crew - all men - were left stranded, 2,000 miles from the Australian coast, after their catamaran, Kingfisher2, dismasted deep in the Southern Ocean.

However, it is in MacArthur's nature only to draw positives from such an experience. "We didn't break the record, but it wasn't a failure. We had no control over what happened. We still don't know why the mast came down. When you take new technology into extreme places you're always going to have problems. But the fact that we got off that boat - 13 guys and me - still as a team after all we'd been through was awesome.

"After failing to beat the record we'd had to spend 14 days at sea, with nothing to do, just trying to get back to Australia. And the first thing we did when we got off that boat was to go together, all of us, to the pub. We were a team and we'd stuck together and that was some achievement."

There have been suggestions in one or two quarters that in turning her attention to record-breaking, MacArthur is shying away from competition with other sailors. She rejects that idea out of hand.

"For one thing I've never been wholly motivated by competition," she said. "I love the water. I love sailing. When I enter a race, my motivation isn't to win, it's to take part. When you're up and running of course you want to win, but that's not the original motivation for me. As for record-breaking, in many ways there are greater pressures than there are in racing. I discovered that in the Jules Verne.

"Record-breaking is tough. You're setting out on a course in the way you do in a race, but you're trying to break someone's record when you know they were never in the same wind conditions as you. You're never going to go the same speed as them. All you can do is sail the boat at its best potential all the time and get the weather as best you can at the beginning. That's all you can do. It's about mental strength and hanging on in there."

If MacArthur does break records, she will make as many waves - in all probability many more - on the other side of the Channel as she will in Britain. Her popularity in France is underlined by the fact that more French journalists than British crossed the world this week to report on the trimaran's launch.

"She is a phenomenon," says one of the French reporters, Christel de Taddeo of Le Journal du Dimanche. "The French are fascinated by the romance and adventure of ocean racing and Ellen MacArthur's story is an amazing one: a small, young English girl taking on and frequently beating the best sailors in the world. The French also love the fact that she has made such an effort to speak their language."

MacArthur is keen to rekindle British interest in ocean racing and her Offshore Challenges company has already paved the way by taking over the organisation of the OSTAR single-handed transatlantic race. The 2004 edition sets off from Plymouth in May.

"What a lot of people forget is that Britain led the way in ocean racing," MacArthur said. "Sailors like Francis Chichester, Robin Knox-Johnston and Chay Blyth were truly ground-breaking. Nobody else was doing what they did. And the British public loved them.

"The OSTAR is the original transatlantic race. It was started by the British and is still a British race, even if the recent sponsors have all been French. But there will probably only be a few hundred people in Plymouth in May to watch. If it weren't for the boats you probably wouldn't know a race was going on. The French equivalent is the Route du Rhum. When you go to the start of that race in St Malo you see a million people there.

"Eric Tabarly winning the second OSTAR changed everything for the French. He became a national hero. He was paraded down the Champs Elysées. There were hundreds of thousands of people there and from that moment on sailing in France captured the public imagination. They followed the sport with a passion which we lost for some reason."

MacArthur also points out that financial support for solo sailors in Britain "other than from sponsors" is all but non-existent. "In France the Government helps," she said. "There's a school for solo sailors in Brittany. It's Government-funded. You can go and sail boats and they provide weather and fitness courses. It's like a camp that you go and live in all year and you go out to do events. We just don't have anything like that in the UK. There is good support for the Olympic sailors, who deserve every penny they get because they've had fantastic success, but there's nothing for solo sailors."

The irony, of course, is that Britain now has arguably the biggest name in the sport - and certainly one of its most impressive ambassadors. Sponsors love MacArthur for her accessibility, her ease in the public gaze - her performance here in opening this week's London Boat Show via a satellite link-up was like that of a veteran broadcaster - and her all-round communication skills. Her hugely successful book was all her own work, while her natural touch in front of the cameras - of which there will be 12 on Castorama B & Q - was highlighted by the extraordinary footage she shot for a television documentary during the Vendée Globe.

"I took 42 hours of tape in the Vendée Globe," she said. "I wanted to come back from that race with something that showed what it's really like to compete in an event like that because nobody really knows other than the competitors. Part of the reason I do it is because it's my job, but there is more to it than that. You have to have a motivation inside you to share your experience." And motivation is something that Ellen MacArthur has never lacked.