McDonald sailing through the gender divide

'You see some funny old things. We once got followed by a killer whale for a few hours in the Southern Ocean. They go so fast'

It is the toilet that rather horrifies me. I supposed there might be a little cubicle, but no, there is just a stark bowl in the cramped galley area, barely a yard from where the food preparation takes place. It is only freeze-dried food, but even so.

I am at the Royal Southern Yacht Club in Hamble, Hampshire, on board the New Zealander Grant Dalton's boat, Amer Sports One. Dalton's boat is being prepared for its voyage around the world in the Volvo Ocean Race. So is its sister boat, Amer Sports Too, to be skippered by Lisa McDonald.

Her boat is not here today, but she assures me that it is very similar down below. No frills. "Although the sailmakers have made us a lightweight curtain to pull around the loo," she said, noting and heartily amused by my concern. I tell her I am relieved to hear it.

Having interviewed Ellen MacArthur before her heroic achievements in the Vendée Globe single-handed race, my notion of a round-the-world yachtsperson as a weathered sea dog with an anchor tattoo should be well and truly scuppered. Yet still it is a surprise to find the 31-year-old McDonald so petite and feminine, with a dazzling smile and a nervous giggle.

She is American, not that there is the slightest hint of it in her accent. She hasn't lived there for 14 years, but none the less, these last eight days must have taken quite an emotional toll. I muse that over the course of the next nine months, the likely duration of the race, the middle of the ocean might just be the safest place to be. "Yes, sadly," she said. "When you're sailing you are oblivious to what is going on in the world, it just ticks on without you."

She has circumnavigated the globe once before, in the all-woman team which contested the Whitbread Round The World Race four years ago.

The Whitbread has now become the Volvo Ocean Race, and it starts in Southampton on Sunday, with McDonald skippering one of eight participating boats – and her husband Neal, incidentally, in another. McDonald's is the only all-woman crew. There will be 12 on board – herself and her Australian navigator Genevieve White, and then two watch groups of five, who will alternate four-hour shifts around the clock. The race, scheduled to finish around 9 June next year, has nine stages, of which the first, from Southampton to Cape Town, is the longest.

Provocatively, I remark on something Ellen MacArthur was recently reported as saying, to the effect that all-women crews do sailing a disservice, that a sailor is a sailor is a sailor. If she was quoted correctly, MacArthur was being a trifle disingenuous, given that she owes her own celebrity as much to her gender as her remarkable sailing ability.

Whatever, McDonald responds carefully saying that she is unaware of such comments. "An all-female team offers a marketing value to the sponsors that the guys' teams just can't give," she adds. "If there are eight boats, and one reports that it's in a big storm, then the first thing almost everyone wants to know is how the girls are getting on."

Fair enough, but what are the advantages and disadvantages, sailing-wise, of an all-female crew? Surely they can't match the chaps for brute strength, for example? "No, although there are always a couple of girls who are as strong if not stronger than some of the guys. We just don't have the same quantity of strength. In some boats you can make up for that in how you gear the winches, but we haven't got that kind of gearing. So decision-making becomes more important.

"You have to be a bit more clever if you're going into big storm clouds in the doldrums. You can easily do 10 sail changes in a day there, but if we do three or four, we won't be as tired as the guys who do 10. We have to think about fewer sail changes but coming out with the same results." In other words, McDonald will arguably need her wits about her more than any other skipper in the race. She will need to be a supreme tactician, decision-maker, motivator, even counsellor, for there will surely be times when gloom overcomes one or more of her crew. Heavens, there might even be the odd personality clash. "Yes, but sailors are a very different breed of people," she said. "To do this you have to be flexible in personality. There will be times when someone is having a bad day, but there will be 11 others to push them back up. There will be those times when you're doing a sail change and you've got it all back on board, then it blows off the side. We live in extremes out there. The great days are really great, and the bad days are really bad.

"It is all about keeping the boat together, the crew together, not breaking the boat or the crew, and going fast in the right direction. If you cover all that, you're laughing."

And does it irk her that, despite the achievements of MacArthur and others, not least herself, attitudes towards female sailors still tend towards the patronising? "Jolly well done... for a woman," that sort of thing.

"You just have to develop a thick skin," she said, cheerfully. "It is still a very male-dominated sport. There aren't many Ellen MacArthurs or Tracy Edwardses out there, and we can't change that until more women are doing better than the guys. Look at our team. We have six people with experience of this race once, whereas Grant's team has several guys who've done it four or five times. Once we've done it four or five times, that changes everything."

Then, a rather indelicate question comes to mind. I understand that the menstrual cycles of a group of women closeted together start following the same pattern. Has that been her experience of sailing in all-female crews? She is not offended. "Yes, to a certain extent." Blimey. So you might all have a really bad day together? She laughs. "We might." It's definitely time to change the subject. And yet I find that I am captivated by what I have seen of the spartan living quarters McDonald and her crew will have to endure.

Risking, yet again, the charge of sexism, I note that women are generally more hygienic creatures than men, and ask how they will cope? Again, she does not take offence. "Washing comes down to standing under a huge rain cloud in the doldrums. Water fills up in the bottom of the main sail, and girls all get some shampoo, stand under the main sail and someone tips it.

"It's quite clean-living on board, actually. We make fresh water every day. We have a desalinator, which works by reverse osmosis, and we use that water for making freeze-dried food, or that hot cup of tea in the middle of the night, when you really need it. When it's stinking hot in the doldrums, and you're trying to find any shade you can, you do think 'God, an ice-cream would go down a treat'. But it's fine, really." Unlike the Vendée Globe, the Volvo affords crews the luxury of on-shore stopovers for repairs and recuperation, sometimes lasting for several weeks.

What will McDonald most look forward to about her stops? "Eating something crunchy. Freeze-dried food isn't crunchy. And a hot bath. And seeing my husband, obviously." Her husband, she adds matter-of-factly, is her greatest inspiration. "He's represented his country in the Olympics, he has world records. We sail a lot together in our spare time."

But she is unlikely to stay in contact with him. "Technically I can keep in touch with him, but I probably won't. We'll be thinking about each other, of course, but I'll be working every minute of the watch, which is so knackering that I'll be sleeping almost every minute off watch. And I know he'll be doing the same thing."

As a child, McDonald spent her summers in Newport, Rhode Island, one of the main sailing centres along America's east coast. But she did not catch the bug until a friend invited her to crew on a boat bound for the Caribbean. Since then, she has twice taken part in the America's Cup, and sailed in the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race which claimed six lives. For all its dangers, however, she becomes quite lyrical about the joys of long-distance, competitive sailing. "When the boat is moving along on the optimum course with the right sails up, and you're going really fast through the water, and the sun is shining, and you know where the rest of the fleet is... there's a feeling on board, which I suppose is like in footie when you and your mates get the ball at the right end of the field and score, and you stop, and look around, and reflect that you couldn't have done it without those five. It's like that, really."

She enthuses, too, about the surrounding wildlife. "We do tend to take it for granted, but there are dolphins with you all the time. Just coming up from Spain [where the team has been training] we had them every day, whole schools of them, curious about this ghastly beast underwater. And we see whales and sharks, and albatross. And little birds which sometimes get lost, off islands like the Canaries. They can't keep up with the flock, get swept away in a weather system, and end up in the middle of nowhere. When they land on the boat, it normally means they're not very well.

"You see some funny old things. We once got followed by a killer whale for a few hours in the Southern Ocean. They go so fast, it's incredible. We've got a marine biologist on board, who knows all the beasts we come across."

A year ago, she hardly expected to be on board herself. She was desperately trying to find sponsorship, cold-calling companies and explaining the marketing value of the exercise. "I'm genuinely surprised that more people don't do it," she said. "What a great way to get your name round the world, on a floating billboard, with all those different stopovers."

Which may be, but she had more or less given up hope, and was planning instead to ask the participating teams whether they needed any shore support "so that I could keep up with all the technical changes which take place every four years" when Dalton phoned, out of the blue. He had some sponsorship in place for his boat, and was thinking of mobilising a second.

"That was in May or June. He asked me to do bit of homework, and to get back to him if I thought I could put it together. I was a bit stunned at first. Could we build the boat, and get the infrastructure together, in such a short space of time?"

They could, which brings us to the Royal Southern Yacht Club on this bright autumnal day. I chat to one of the little flotilla of sailing enthusiasts present. He said that McDonald is nice enough to be a skipper, but wonders whether she is nasty enough. I ask the same question of her.

"I don't think I'll need to be. These girls are a fantastic bunch and most of them know each other already. Being skipper is like being a manager of a business, and I have Grant Dalton to look up to. He's a brilliant organiser, the only person I can think of who could bring this number of people together, and I have learnt from him."

From Sunday, though, apart from her crew and other animals, she's on her own. Can she beat her husband's boat, Assa Abloy, which is sailing under the Swedish flag? "That," she said, "would be nice."