Captain courageous

Assa Abloy's skipper Neal McDonald talks about battling the ice - and the seaweed - in the ocean.

Outside the Royal Southern Yacht Club, Hamble-le-Rice was at its gentlest. A soft breeze kissed the boats moored on the river. Wires tap-tapped on a score of masts. The sound of Test cricket was carried out of a Rover's radio, across the car park and in through the club's open window. 'Delicately played down to third man,' purred Blowers. 'Fifty pence for two hours,' the driver of the Rover told his wife as he contemplated the pay and display.

Inside the club, Neal McDonald was talking about ice in the Southern Ocean. 'I've been down there a fair bit, but I've never seen so much of the stuff. I invest most of my time in the period between midnight and four in the morning. That's when things tend to go wrong. So, I'm on deck in the pitch black and I'm thinking to myself that if we hit an iceberg, or even a small bit of one - a growler - at 25 knots, then we're dead. We're 2,000 miles from the nearest help. That's it.

'So, I'm trying to work out what to do. Do we reduce speed by half, to 12 knots? If we hit ice we're still dead. So, you just do what you know everyone else in the race is doing. You keep going and you keep your eyes peeled. Even so, this ice would still come out of nowhere in the night and slide past the boat.'

After the age in the ice during leg four, the long haul from Auckland to Rio de Janeiro, came the seaweed moment. Somewhere off the easternmost tip of Argentina, McDonald's boat, Assa Abloy, suddenly began to lose ground on the other boats. The 12-man crew went through their hi-tech troubleshooting and then peeped through a small glass panel to see that the keel was wrapped in kelp. McDonald was over the side in a flash, knife in mouth....

It's one hell of a story. And today it will end as Assa Abloy crosses the finish line in Kiel on the Baltic after the 10-leg, eight-boat, 32,700-nautical mile round trip of the globe that is the Volvo Ocean Race.

I meet him after leg eight, the trek back across the Atlantic to Europe, from Baltimore to la Rochelle. He is relaxed in hot Hampshire, blond, blue-eyed and broad, although he thinks he's probably done some long-term damage to his shoulders. 'We all have. Wrists and shoulders. It takes its toll, a nine-month race like this.'

He wasn't even going to be part of it at first, preferring to work until last summer on the GBR Challenge for the America's Cup. But three months before the start of the Volvo he realised that he faced a lonely old time without his wife, Lisa, who was to skipper the Nautor Challenge all-women boat, Amer Sports Too.

'I'd always been in contact with the Assa Abloy crew in a half-advisory category. Suddenly I was full-time with them as helmsman and watch-leader.' If he couldn't join Lisa, at least he could now beat her.

Then came the mutiny. On leg one from Southampton to Cape Town, Assa Abloy had a skipper called Roy Heiner. On leg two, from Cape Town to Sydney they had Neal McDonald in charge. It's not something that puts McDonald at ease: 'It was uncomfortable for everyone. I suppose, though, that it all came down to different cultural agendas. Historically, the skipper did everything from the moment he was appointed to the end of the race. Nowadays, it's a bit more like a management consortium between sailors and sponsors. With six or seven nationalities on board, things with Roy were a bit edgy and it was felt we lost momentum even before the start.'

Heiner's departure was not by long boat cast off from the Bounty. The Swedish locks and security people - that's what Assa Abloy are - did it very politely and Swedishly. And McDonald was placed in charge.

'I buggered up leg two,' the new skipper confesses. 'We were second most of the way, but somewhere underneath Australia, things just didn't go right. We'd had to find a new steerer in Cape Town for a start and things in general were still a bit unsettled. I wouldn't have been surprised to be replaced myself after the second leg.'

The lock people stuck with him and Assa Abloy won the third stage, from Sydney to Auckland, a leg that included the Sydney-Hobart Race and a brief stopover in Tasmania.

Then came the giant leg across the Southern Ocean, through the ice, round Cape Horn, through the kelp and up to Rio. 'Nearly 7,000 miles and we finished up going from second to fourth in the last 20 miles. All that distance and towards the end we were within 10 yards of each other.'

They won the next leg, from Rio to Miami, and then leg nine from La Rochelle to Gothenburg, the one for which he was preparing when we meet in Hamble. Overall, Assa Abloy has moved up the fleet to lie second behind the German boat Illbruck, skippered by John Kostecki. Five points behind Illbruck before the short dash of 250 miles from Gothenburg to Kiel, Assa Abloy has to win today and Illbruck must come nowhere. The Germans are likely to stick very close to the Swedes and their English skipper.

His wife is at the other end of the field, lying eighth. McDonald knows what is good for him and says: 'She may be eighth out of eight, but if there were 20 boats racing, she'd be eighth out of 20.'

Amer Sports Too will not win. Assa Abloy is not likely to win. But this has been a circumnavigation of distinction. It's what millpond summer days are for in Hamble-le-Rice: Test match commentary on the radio in a Rover in the car park, and Neal McDonald telling you very calmly how he slid past deadly icebergs in the depths of the night over the great Southern Ocean.

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