What was wrong with hard tack, salt beef, a few limes and a barrel of rum? Generations of circumnavigators took to the oceans with meagre rations, but not now. Alex Thomson is running through the checklist for his latest voyage as if planning a picnic: Manchego cheese, Parma ham, bacon wraps (bread is too heavy) and lashings of Hellman’s.

“You’ll never see me on a boat without mayonnaise,” Thomson says. “I’m fanatical. It may sound bad for you, with 80 per cent fat, but it’s largely good fat. It makes the freeze-dried food taste nice, too. I set aside 750ml a week for the Vendée.”

It meant that about eight litres of greasy goo had to be carted back to Gosport around this time last year. Thomson, who holds world records for single and double-handed sailing, may claim to have had the fastest boat in last year’s Vendée Globe, the four-yearly solo round-the-world race, but his voyage lasted only 32 hours before he hit what he calls a UFO — “That’s unidentified floating object” — and had to limp home with a broken hull.

He did well to get that far. Three weeks before the race, while at anchor off the coast of France, Hugo Boss, his 60-foot vessel, was rammed amidships by a careless French fisherman, tearing a 12-foot gash.

It could have been much worse. “One metre farther back and I’d have been killed,” Thomson, who had been sleeping down below, said. Next month he goes to court to begin a lengthy insurance claim against the fisherman, but the cost to Thomson’s dream of becoming the first British winner of the Vendée was far greater than the money he had to find for repairs.

Although the collision that ended his voyage was separate from the accident with the fishing boat, Thomson is aware that taking on a 25,000-mile journey in a hastily refurbished boat was not ideal. It could have fallen apart at any time, but before the accident he had been convinced that he was going to win.

He said: “The designer of the boat that came second phoned me later and said, ‘I feel sorry for you because I know you were faster than my boat and better prepared. You should have won.’ ”

There was no time for soul-searching, however. Thomson shook the disappointment out of his system by taking a holiday in Kenya, kite-surfing while his rivals were making their way down the Atlantic, and then he got to work on preparing for the next Vendée in 2012.

“I realised I had a six-month head-start on everyone else,” he says. “Time is the most precious thing in what we do — not money — and I started to use that to get ready for the next one.”

On Sunday, Thomson will take on his first big challenge since the Vendée. He and Ross Daniel, his boat captain, will try to become the first non-French crew to win the Transat Jacques Vabre, a biennial race from France to Latin America following the old coffee trading routes. This year it ends in Costa Rica.

It will be the third Jacques Vabre that Thomson has contested. In 1999, a year after becoming the youngest skipper to win a Clipper circumnavigation race, he was seventh. Four years later, he was second. He hopes to go one better this time, but it is only a staging post.

“Winning is important, as is winning every race, but everything we do now is learning how to improve for the Vendée,” he says.

Thomson will unveil a new vessel in April — the former Pindar, designed by the respected Juan Kouyoumdjian, which Brian Thompson, his compatriot, sailed to fifth place in last year’s Vendée, but has more potential than his existing boat — and with a new sponsorship package due to be in place with Hugo Boss, he has grand plans.

A second Barcelona World Race beckons — he came second with Andrew Cape in 2008 — and maybe another Jacques Vabre, but the real challenge starts in 2012.

Britain has had notable success in the Vendée — Dame Ellen MacArthur was second in 2001, Mike Golding third in 2005 and Sam Davies fourth last year, with three other Britons in the top eight — but the six races have been won by French sailors and Thomson feels that if their dominance is to be broken, the community of English sailors has to pool its resources.

“The reason the French do so well is they have this place called Port La Forêt where they go to train together,” he says. “They even get government funding for it. The British sailors need to work together more.

“In the past we were all a bit Secret Squirrel about what we were doing, but if we co-operated all our levels would increase — and there will be big advantages in cost, too. My attitude is that it is better for British sailors to come first, second, third in whatever order than seventh, eighth, ninth.”