MACSF crossed the finish line on the 15 of July at 15:19:34’ (French hour) after 10 days, 23 hours, 49 minutes et 34 seconds. Initial reactions from Isabelle Joschke.

“Right now, I have a mixture of emotions with a little bitterness at having got off to a good start in the race and then not being able to battle right the way to the wire. At the same time though, I am really happy to have got the boat qualified and to finally be ready for the Vendée Globe. I have my ticket for the start on 8 November and that’s the most important thing and something that is crucial for the MACSF project.

I had a set of objectives for this race and I’ve achieved them all, so essentially I’m pretty pleased. It was important for me to see what I was capable of doing in competition. It had been a long time as I’ve had a fair few pit stops in my last transatlantics. As a result, regaining my confidence aboard the boat, in contact with the others, seeing that I still know how to race, is very important to me. It’s good news, now I have to work out how to strike a balance. These boats are very quick and dangerous and, on a personal  level, I still need to process certain elements in my mind today in order to draw the right conclusions and sail as intelligently as possible in the round the world.

The human is going to be an important parameter, the most important thing for me. We’ve worked well on the ergonomics. With regards to myself, I’m going to have to find a way to rest. During the race I battled a great deal and I also did a lot of repairs. There were a lot of small issues, which was extremely tiring.

I believe that I won’t be able to maintain a rhythm like this on a round the world. That’s one of the things I’m mulling over today: what I can do to set sail feeling quietly confident, how I can sleep from the start, how I can ensure I’m always in good shape to deal with anything that comes my way. Maybe I’ll need to ease off the pace and learn to attack in certain conditions. The Vendée Globe will be a very different ball game to the Vendée-Arctique-Les Sables d’Olonne, but when you’re in a competition, you get caught up in it all and you tend to forget about the long term. Here, we were constantly reacting in the short term and I played that card to the full. In a Vendée Globe, I would react differently and I fully accept that. I’m especially proud to have kept up a steady pace in the race, despite the plethora of minor issues I had before the boom broke”.