“I am over the moon. We have been working so hard on this for so long and we have had our ups and downs. We had to tough it out for the in-port race in Spain but we believed in the boat, and this is huge, really huge, as we always wanted to be the first into Cape Town.

“The boat did an amazing job and was just on fire. We threw everything at it; we battled against bad weather, broke the boat on the first night and even had a fire on board – we quite literally had everything.

“We love this boat and have always loved this boat, it is our baby. It had looked after us so well but I am not sure if we looked after it as well.

“The guys on board have done an amazing job. It has been very tricky tactically but we just managed to keep the boat moving at a fast pace.

“It is unbelievable to be here. Team ABN AMRO has worked so hard at this. We were told by our boat designer Juan Kouyoumdjian that we would average 16 knots of boat speed on this leg and we all laughed. In fact we have averaged 15.95 knots and put in nearly 400 miles almost every day of this leg, which is just incredible.

“I am not sure if I would call it fun, as it has been incredibly high stress, but it was just amazing to come in and see Table Mountain – it is always a pleasure to see the ‘table’ and we are all really looking forward to our time here.”