Minis can be fast an exciting, they can also be painfully slow, but whatever they are they are certainly not overly spacious or comfortable. Most skippers get off after a day or weeks sailing with grimacing faces, desperately unfolding and tugging arms and legs back into their original configuration before retiring to houses with warm beds and big kitchens.

I don’t have anywhere else to go, as I live on my boat full time. At the end of each day’s training I sponge out the water, unroll and inflate my air mattress, cook dinner on my JetBoil camping stove and snuggle down into my Ocean Sleepware sleeping bag. My best friend at the moment is my little electric heater that I invested in after I almost slipped off the boat in the morning because the decks had iced over.

I am here in Pornichet training full time, a situation made possible by serious penny pinching for, while I received help to buy the boat, I don’t have a title sponsor and thus have a minimal operating budget. When I am qualified for the Transat after the first two races of the season I will have a miss a chunk of races in order to return to the UK to work in order to make it through the rest of the season.

I am having difficulty mastering the spinnaker at the moment, which is certainly trying my patience. The flying sails on Minis are launched from a 2 metre (3 metre for the protos) rotating bowsprit that allows the pole to fold back within the length of the boat when starting or going upwind. The pole is controlled laterally by two guys/braces and a launching line that initially unfolds the pole from the side of the boat. The margin of error in trimming the braces is miniscule, and must be carefully coordinated with the rest of the sails.

For example, the steps to gybe are as follows.

1. Ease pole to centre using windward winch. Close clutch to maintain position.
2. Take up slack on leeward brace
3. Prepare new sheet on windward winch
4. Flake working sheet to allow it to run during gybe
5. Move main traveller to centre and pull in the main a little.
6. Release fine trim on working running backstay
7. Remove working spin sheet from cleat and bear away to run deep
8. Ease working sheet while taking up on lazy sheet until clew in front of forestay.
9. Blow working sheet and take up on new working sheet until spin fills on new side.
10. Steer through gybe to gybe the main against the old runner
11. Take up on new new runner
12. Release old runner and trim fine tune on new runner.
13. Ease Main
14. Clean new windward winch and load brace.
15. Allow 15 cm of slack on leeward brace
16. Grind pole to weather
17. Trim sails.
18. Smile. Go fast.

As is clear from the above, spinnaker work is no mean feat singlehanded assuming thing go well and the maneuver is completed without broaching or breaking anything. Lately the aluminium spinnaker pole has been breaking at the foot, in what everyone agrees are unreasonable circumstances. Clearly this is due to the fact that the boat has many thousands of miles on it and parts of it are perhaps a bit tired, but its frustrating as mechanical failures get in the way of training and do a number on my confidence.

When the pole breaks it becomes very difficult to recover the spinnaker in a controlled fashion and I inevitably get it seriously wet. At this point I once stood on my dish soap that I had left in my cockpit bags and me, the boat and the spinnaker disappeared under clouds of slippery foam. I then had to pile the whole mess down below in order to sail back to port, thereby dumping a soggy mess in not only my boat, but also my living room!

That night sat down with my camping meal, in the cold, and listened to Stevie Ray Vaughn sing the Blues. I know this is the first step in a chain of events that will lead me to the Vendee, but its not always easy. Bring on the races.