The rumours were that she had retired from sailing for good, fallen in love and planned to spend all her time building an eco-house on the Isle of Skye. Ever hands on, she has been doing some of the building herself, but Dame Ellen MacArthur says that she has not disappeared from public view for ever. She has just been on ice and to prove it she spent the weekend in St Moritz, Switzerland, trying the four-man bob for the first time on the only natural ice run in the world. She emerged thrilled from her 75 seconds on the 80mph, mile-long ride.

MacArthur has often wrong-footed the pundits on what she was going to do. In 2004, they thought she was going to take part in the Vendée Globe and instead she went for and broke the solo round-the-world record. It was always known she had something new planned, but in the spaces left by her silences, rumour flourished about the next step for the 5ft 2in woman from Derbyshire, who became the most famous sailor of her generation.

“We’re in the final days of organising the next project, there are lots of options of the table,” MacArthur said. “We’re building an IMOCA 60 [in Cowes] and the Round Britain & Ireland Challenge will be my next race. It’s categorically not true [I’ve retired]. I’m 30, not 50. I’m motivated. I’m not about to emigrate to some island in the middle of nowhere.”

She insists she is definitely not doing the 2008-09 Vendée Globe, the blue-riband 60-footer race that brought her to global attention when she finished second in 2000, at the age of 24. Some of her potential competitors, such as Mike Golding, are not so sure. “I am still hopeful of persuading Ellen,” Golding said. “It’s going to be such an amazing field, the best ever, and I don’t think she should, or will want to miss it.”

MacArthur laughs. “Mike said that?” she asked. “I had to make the decision. The last round-the-world was brutal and I knew if I went into the Vendée I’d come out and say I can’t do that again.”Her biggest project will centre on the Barcelona World Race, a novel two-handed round-the-world race that begins in November and is being set up by Offshore Challenges, the company she founded with Mark Turner, her business partner, in 1995. At least one of the entries — Turner says there are eight so far, though only five have been announced — will be a team run by MacArthur. But there are more ambitious plans.

“We are probably in the last ten days of deciding [what to do],” Turner said. “February 15 is the day to decide which way to go. What form that team takes, whether we have the funding to do more than one boat, a second later, two boats in 2008, I don’t know. But the objective was always to get to two boats. Ellen would lead the project with two skippers.”

It will be the biggest challenge for Turner and MacArthur, whose great success thus far has come only when she has been skipper. But for all the carping from jealous voices in the sailing world, the Barcelona Race does look genuinely innovative and already has a good cast list, with the likes of Vincent Riou and Jean-Pierre Dick confirmed.

But MacArthur may have to resist the lure of taking the helm herself, with all the publicity that would bring. “It’s not planned, there is a very small chance,” she said.

She also has a house on Skye to finish. In June, she was made a Freeman of Skye and Lochalsh, having recently discovered that her great-great-grandfather was a fisherman from Luib, who left the island in the 1880s to settle in Derbyshire, where the family has lived since.

“Ellen’s a learning machine, she ended up in sailing, but she could have done anything,” Turner said. “She adores learning new things; right now it might be about building an eco-house and she is approaching that with the same passion, pouring the concrete herself and making decisions.”

Turner says her environmental interests may soon expand beyond the Save the Albatross campaign and her new house, but it is only a break from sailing. She is not jumping ship.