SailingPR - Sailing & Regatas

Again, I would have to be here to believe it. The Agulhas Current snakes around like a giant serpent and with every twist it throws up either a good or bad current and an ever changing sea state. All we can do is to try to minimise the time we spend in the bad bits and maximise the good. At least it is warm water so life on deck though wet is not too bad.

‘OK sailing boffins why is a Chinese gybe called a Chinese gybe? Nobody on the Green Dragon knows and I kind of feel we should.’

Ian Walker - skipper

So often, when people in Cape Town realised I was involved with a team, I was asked about the race, wished well for the next leg and told how impressed people are with what we are doing. Start day showed this feeling amongst South Africans impressively. Our departure was a big thing for the citizens of the stopover as it was for us. I am already looking forward to coming back and hope to have more time; honestly, the stopover was much too short.

The triangle the fleet sailed was a great show, but we had been over ambitious trying to outsmart the rest of the fleet by tacking away and looking for more breeze offshore. The fleet slipped through under Table Mountain while we were left becalmed in the transition zone, sometimes seeing the breeze line just 50 metres away being unable to catch it. Only when the fleet was on the horizon, the Gods considered the price high enough and let us follow the pack.
Again, we were fighting the onboard technology for the first two days into the leg.

First, the keel developed its own habit of where to position itself and slowly but steadily dropped down. The drop rate increased and soon it was almost permanent pumping with the DC unit to keep it on max cant. Nick Bubb took the problem on and after manipulating the pressure relieve valves, the keel was under control.

Meanwhile Mark reported a buzzer bothering him with an annoying noise, which should indicate an electrical power leak according to Livewire, the designers and manufacturers of the onboard media system. Not long after, we felt a slight electrical shock when touching the moist surface of the anti-slip pad on the navstation.

It took time to isolate electrical circuits and get to the ground of the problem. Only after switching off one Sat C, internal lighting and one GPS unit was there no measureable electrical potential between the hull and the batteries. Once the conditions get easier, I will try to solve the problem and have all systems up and running. All this distracts from racing, maybe it is part of the game called Volvo Ocean Race.

After 36 hours routine, sleep and watch patterns have settled once again and we are travelling with the fleet eastwards. The fleet has soon split into the northern and the southern group and it will be very interesting who is going to be favoured when finally pointing bows towards India.

Andreas Hanakamp - skipper

In case you are wondering…

Waves roaring over the deck, intense loud slamming, and hanging on to your bunk whilst trying to catch some sleep. What’s up? I thought this was meant to be a nice sub-tropical leg! Forget the champagne sailing, the only bubbles we are seeing are on the camera lenses. Forget the ‘80s look with shorts and T-shirts and ray-bans, think survival suits and helmets. Forget a nice foie-grass on toast, think ‘how do I get as many calories as possible in without spilling the whole lot on the ceiling’.

My four-year old son keeps dragging us to the Volvo Dome to watch the Volvo movie. He loves the wild music, the pictures of waves exploding into white on the bow. For 10-minutes he doesn’t blink and his mouth is wide open in amazement. In the mean time, my wife is holding back tears and grabs my hand tight. At the end of the movie, he asks: ‘Daddy, you do all this for a trophy? Silly Daddy!’ My wife in the meantime is thinking of the sleepless nights she will have when she knows we are pushing the boats down south with no help within days.

The Volvo is not just a bunch of guys racing their mates, it is a community of families travelling around the world, living the race every minute of the day. I keep this as a reminder to myself when I try to motivate myself to get out of the nice warm bunk and push hard again. On the boat, we are pulling the long straw with amazing surfs and crazy sailing. We are incredibly lucky with the support we get from our families, friends and shore crew who in the end make our dream possible.

We are completely under water again and conditions are extreme whilst we are blasting east. East? Yes, in case you are wondering, we did get the note from the Race Committee that we have changed destinations. No we are not going to Australia, we are going to Asia. Soon however Australia will be the closest continent as it is yet another day and a half before we turn north towards India. By tonight conditions should improve a bit, with the 35-40knot winds over and done with. So far no breakages, so we are in a good shape.

Even though our easterly route means an extra 900 nm of sailing, none of us is complaining. The alternative scenario is namely a beat all the way from Cape Town to Mauritius. This is by far the most likely scenario, so has our good behaviour in Cape Town made the Gods of the Sea look on us favorably? Who knows, but in any case, we have a big high blocking our way north at the moment, and two low pressure systems will help to get round it to the east. The added bonus of being far east is that we will have a great wind angle in the trade winds later (and we might be able to crack that champagne?)

Back to my bunk for another bumpy ride. We have a tight luff sail up, so less chance of broaching, pitch poling or other nasty stuff. Phew!

Sleep well my love, we are fast, but safe!

Wouter Verbraak - navigator

The guys starting to feel a little better, but we’re still one man down; Daryl (Wislang/NZL) is still not well. Jordi has been repairing the spinnaker, which is a nearly impossible task, as he gets bounced around in the bow.

We had some exciting sailing last night, with puffs up to 40 knots, hang on boys. Now the breeze is dropping, and our spinnaker is still in bits. It will take at least another 10 hours, so we will lose some distance. We have been hanging in ok, similar distance runs; it helps when you sail in the same piece of water. So not much happening, everybody is still a bit tired, as they have to stand in for the sailmakers. As well, the eating is not going too well yet for some of us, but hope this will go better in a few days.

Cheers,

Bouwe Bekking - skipper

I thought I’d be feeling better by today. I was right. We changed sails earlier today to our high-clew reacher - ‘the R1’. We are sailing in 25 to 40 knots of wind and 8 meter high waves. It’s a wild and bumpy ride. The surf is up.

Our sail change came with some adventure. We use our J4, a small jib fore sail that flies on a furler off our staysail halyard, almost all of the time, when sailing downwind. During our sail change, the tack pin that connects the furling unit, and sail, to the deck of the boat broke.

Imagine sailing in 30 knots of wind with the head (top corner) and clue (back corner) of the sail still attached, while the tack (bottom corner) whips around violently with an 3kg metal furling unit attached to the tail end of it. As we tried to wrestle the sail to the deck someone said ‘boy, this is dangerous’…he was exactly right.

I’ve been dreading writing the blog entry to describe the strategy and route to India. I don’t think that I can do it with a simple screen shot and words alone. I think that I would need a 20-slide PowerPoint deck and live commentary, to capture the complete strategy…this route is complicated and has about five moving parts.

Being adaptable and managing risk is going to be the winning solution in this leg. To give a simple version:

Right now, we are sailing on the backside of a low-pressure system. This system is allowing us to get east very quickly, due to the southwest winds in this section of the system. We will head almost due east and past the scoring gate. For this leg, our mid scoring gate is the Longitude 58 E. The furthest boats to the east will pick up the most points at this mid-leg gate.

Just about the time we arrive at the scoring gate, the wind will shift to the northwest, as another low-pressure system catches up with us. This will allow us to turn to a northeasterly course. We will follow this system for a day and a half as we head towards the prevailing east trade winds that live north of 30 latitude.

The transition from the northwesterly winds that are driven by the low-pressure system and the east trades could be a bit rough. I’ll spend the next several days working out the details of how we are going to play the shift from one weather system to the next. Currently, we are too far away from that point, and I don’t have all the information I need yet to make a call this early. We’ll stay adaptable in the mean time…

The easterly trade winds will then take us up to the doldrums. The last part of this leg is going to be very tricky. The monsoon season is changing off the coast of India so it’s tough to know if we will finish in a southwest or a northeast monsoon weather pattern by the time we get up to India. I’m keeping an eye on it and following the trends closely. However, the decisions on the strategy for that section of the leg is still 10 days away.

In the meantime, we have some blistering fast sailing to do…

Matt Gregory - navigator

Hi all!

This is Mikel from Telefónica Black down in the roaring forties.

As you all may know, the whole fleet headed south-east as soon as we left Cape Town in order to avoid the high pressure next to the coast and get nice breeze as soon as we could before starting the long way north to Cochin, in India.

This leg is full of ‘Maris Incognita’ as most of the fleet have never sailed before in these waters. We have good winds ahead, and the roaring forties, but soon, heading north we get to the trade winds and to a tricky zone of winds, shifts and calms, before entering into the northern hemisphere.

So here we go in front of the fleet, with more wind than expected, and we know it does not benefit us at all, but for the time being we are handling it pretty well. The forecast says the wind will drop as night goes by, so we are looking forward our conditions.

Today it surpassed our expectations with more than 40 knots of wind and a top speed of 37!!

Exciting, isn’t it?

Apart from that, life goes on as usual, sailing, sailing and sailing. We bail, eat and sleep so that we can sail!

Mikel Pasabant - MCM

Today was another kind of initiation, we had our first real heavy full on massive flat out big broach.

As we love the bigger breeze we kept going south since yesterday and had steady 30 knots today. The first squall topped out at 38, when Nick (Bubb/GBR) handed over to me, when he was quite happy with the feel of the boat under a reefed main, the A6 spinnaker and the storm jib set as staysail.

He was right, on the wheel the boat felt much better than in the navstation, so we kept going, more aggressive when the breeze was down, conservative when the breeze was up. A cloud line brought the wind up to 42 knots and the speed topped out well over 30 knots and we got ready to drop the kite. By the time we were ready, the breeze had gone down to 35 knots and everything was fine. At the watch change, I handed the wheel over to Stig (Westergaard/DEN) and I went for the grinder to assist Wouter (Verbraak – navigator). As before, we were submerged from time to time when the boat shot through massive waves.

Facing aft on the grinder, I heard Stig screaming ‘we Chinese’ as the boat slowed down almost to a standstill up to the mast in solid green. Then everything went into slow motion, not a violent knock down but the boat slowly turning, heeling more and more over to the wrong side, the boom high up in the air until coming over and the kite flying around the forestay to the new leeward side and flapping in the 35 knots breeze. Fate was inexorable, nothing left to be done, but wait for the inevitable. The stack of sails on the aft starboard corner of the boat was under water, the starboard spreader camera as well as the keel and the sails were holding the boat on 90 degrees to its designed floatation.

I climbed the vertical deck (as I normally climb rock) to free the runner, Wouter handed me a knife to cut free the lashing, Cam (Camron Wills/RSA) pulling the runner tail and Oleg (Zherebtsov/RUS) grinding it. Meanwhile, Jeremy (Elliot/IRL) and Mikey (Mike Joubert/RSA) managed to get the keel moving to the other side to righten up the boat again.

Once up, the boat accelerated to 15 knots and all on deck got to the foredeck to take town the A6 that had meanwhile wrapped around the headstay. Once this sail had gone inside, we gybed Kosatka back, got the Q9 out of the bag, had another little issue as it unfurled before it should, unreefed the main and were back on track.

Nobody got hurt, only the pulpit is bent and quite ugly, no other damage (Thanks Rob for the strong boat!). Mark (Covell MCM) managed to record some of it on video, so watch this programme in the near future.

Andreas Hanakamp - skipper

Conditions have progressively got harder over the last 24 hours as we head towards the Southern Ocean. For Green Dragon things were getting better. At 10 am we crossed ahead of Puma by about 6 miles as they gybed North East and we recorded the longest distance in the latest position report.

Our sail combination was obviously fast although we were on the edge with the spinnaker up in over 30 knots. You can tell down below when things are about to go wrong and I was just getting my waterproofs on when there was a huge bang and the boat went into an involuntary Chinese gybe. You might think this is al lright for a boat with such strong Chinese connections but a Chinese gybe is what we all fear most as it is when the boat crash gybes and leaves you on your side with everything including the keel on the wrong side.

As the mainsail hit the weather runners, water started pouring in down below through the ventilation hatches due to the side decks now being underwater, but the boat miraculously turned back the right way, gybed back and righted itself. Everyone’s immediate reaction was that we had broken the rudder, but as it turned out the steering blocks had sheared away down below leaving Neal with no steerage on the weather wheel.

As the boat speared out of control Anthony Merrington (aka Youngster) managed to grab the leeward wheel just in time and straighten us up. Able to steer from only the leeward wheel we managed to drop the spinnaker and affect an immediate repair. Everyone was harnessed on and everything secure so no harm was done. Tom Braidwood, Damian Foxall and Justin Slattery didn’t hesitate to drill right through the hull and secure a new block. Fortunately the only real cost was perhaps 5-10 miles and we are now back up and running with another bar story to tell. I should point out that Damian has never sailed from Cape Town without having to turn back into Port Elizabeth in all his previous Volvo races so we still can’t relax unless the jinx returns. I thought it had.

Ian Walker - skipper

Monday 17th November

The World Sailing Speed Record Council (WSRRC) confirmed today that
Ericsson 4 were the holders of the new Monohull 24-hour record.

Ericsson 4 recorded 596.6 nautical miles in 24 hours between a start
position at 290 49.21 S; 230 42.41 W at18:55 on Monday, October
28,2008 and a finish position at 310 53.14 S; 120 22.21W at 18:55 on
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, while sailing the first leg of the Volvo
Ocean Race, from Alicante in Spain to Cape Town in South Africa.

The previous record 562.96nm was held by ABN AMRO TWO, skippered by
Sebastian Josse in the 2005/96 Volvo Ocean Race.

The Volvo Ocean Race Race Headquarters had originally calculated that
Ericsson 4 had recorded 602.66nm in 24 hours at 18:54 on Wednesday
29th October. The WSRRC received the time and position reports from
the Volvo Ocean Race and have now ratified the the 24-hour
Monohull World Record set by Ericsson 4 at 596.6 nm.

According to the WSSRC rules the Race Organizer may take on the task
of monitoring positions, alerting the WSSRC to possible records and
supplying them with the necessary data, which has been the case in
this instance.

Commenting on the ratified record Volvo Ocean Race Chief Executive
Knut Frostad says:

“This 24 hour record is a fantastic achievement - shattering the
previous record by over 33nm, or 6%. As Race Organizers it is
important to ensure that our data tracking systems are accurate and
that the information we supply is stable. It is unfortunate that our
calculated 24h distance in this case seem to not have been correct,
we are looking into reason for this, however we are always aware of
that any record are subject to ratification by the WSRCC before
becoming official.
Nevertheless the ratified record proves that the Volvo Open 70 Class
are the worlds fastest monohulls. It is a fantastic set by the crew
on Ericsson 4.”

“We are not participating in this race to break speed records, still
we are delighted that the crew of Ericsson 4 managed to set a new
World Record and break the old record by some 33 miles. Although the
conditions were not ideal, listening to the comments of the crew it
was an intense experience to average 24.85 nm over the 24-hour
period, and to have achieved this while the they were one crew member
short is a great reflection on the quality and stamina of the crew of
Ericsson 4 as well as the boat itself,” commented Richard Brisius,
Managing Director of Ericsson Racing Team. “While it has a symbolic
value in having sailed more than 600 nm, in the right conditions we
very much feel that it is something that Ericsson 4 is capable of.”
he concluded.

Both Ericsson 3 and Ericsson 4 are now racing the second leg to
Cochin in southern India.

The morning of the start I woke up at 0500, I tried to go back to sleep but it just didn’t happen. The sun was shining through my window and I made the most of my final few hours in a nice luxurious bed! I did the final check around my room before leaving, to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind, and made my way to the Waterfront. I had packed my bag for Singapore; you have to have a lot of forward planning on this trip. Our containers, which are used by the team at every port, leap frog each other around the globe.

This bags we put in the container in Cape Town will be the bags we will see again in Singapore. It¹s really important to put the right bag in the right container, there have been a few instances when someone on the team is looking quite frantic and then realises that they have put something fairly important in the wrong container and it is thousands of miles away!

After checking my equipment several times, I was happy I had everything I needed onboard. The time flew by and we were all soon on the dock and awaiting our team song to be played, our names to be announced and the lines to untied. The V&A Waterfront was filled with people coming to see us all off. The crew’s families were all there as well, and it was really moving for them all to say goodbye. Saying goodbye to the children was clearly hard for many of team and I know that some of them won’t be seeing them again until we arrive in Singapore at Christmas.

The initial forecast showed some perfect weather conditions as we headed south. We face two days of gales and, quite a contrast from the send off we saw in Cape Town, blue skies and hundreds of spectators boats it was truly amazing. For some of the team, the last few days have been long, after breaking the spreader on Thursday the team has been working around the clock to replace it. It was a crucial repair, but we are all very glad that it was completed and that we are once again out here racing with the best of them!

PUMA had a fantastic start off the line, but Table Bay threw in a little surprise for them as they were stopped in their tracks, allowing the fleet to overtake them. Before we knew it, we were waving goodbye to the beautiful Table Mountain, which vanished gradually in the distance. I guess this is goodbye to Cape Town, see you all again in India!

Guo Chuan – Green Dragon MCM