SailingPR - Sailing & Regatas

Not giving up

Four days into leg two and the Southern Ocean is living up to its name. One broken steering system, one Chinese gybe, one broken boom and now three knockdowns, but we are still charging along for the scoring gate at longitude 58 east.

I have to confess to being slightly nervous about our predicament, but the forecast is good and we will soon be heading North (ish).

We seem to have the boat going pretty well, but we are vulnerable to being knocked down in the frequent squalls as we are fairly committed to carrying a full main and there is no easy way to ease it.

It is also setting very full and this affects the balance of the boat. It wasn’t an easy night for the guys on deck - and the temperature is falling fast. Down below everything is sodden as we have several leaks (one of which is the hole we drilled in the side to jury rig the steering!). We also have a leaking daggerboard case, which has split.

I feel a bit like the Black Adder TV character that refuses to be beaten and keeps on fighting as his arms and legs are cut off one by one by his adversary.

We now have about 400 miles to the scoring gate and we lie in third position (in terms of easting) with a slender 25-mile lead over Puma and about 40 miles over the Russians. Our aim is to defend this as best we can and, over the last 12 hours, we have done just that.

One of our challenges is going to be gybing. We are still discussing how we are going to do this - if at all - maybe we will granny round. We are also trying to sort out how we can reef if we need to. Tom Braidwood is itching to get going on fixing the boom, but for now, we are focusing on sailing fast to the scoring gate.

This focus on racing hard is great for moral and everybody is determined to make the best of what we have. For now then, we are hanging on in there waiting for the wind to drop and shift to allow us to gybe and head back North. Our aim is to get as many points as we can at the scoring gate before worrying too much about how we will get to India. It still looks quite a long way away on the chart!

Oh yes - I don’t wish to sound like a whinging pom but as if things can’t get any worse, I should also mention that somebody has brought a bug on to the boat and half of us now have sore throats and head colds - I suspect it won’t be long before we all do - Joy!

Ian Walker - skipper

Been weird for me onboard today as it was the first day I have felt like I have been onboard. Had a fever and sickness for the first couple of days (courtesy of my 18 month old daughter)and I’m only just coming out of the other side.

It’s strange for so much to be going on and not even noticing it. We had a broach yesterday (apparently!) and also damaged one of our headsails, which Ryan Godfrey swiftly repaired. All I have noticed is the odd slide forward in the bunk when we plough into the back of a wave – it’s a little like climbing into the sack before heading down the bumpy slide in days gone by.

On deck, the conditions were very similar to our record-breaking run except for one element - the waves - and it’s amazing to see just what difference they make. Also had a couple of Albatross giving us the flyby, I think one went between the bowsprit and the stay - I thought we had run the poor thing over until it came out of the other side. It’s bad luck to harm these giants as rumour has it they are the spirits of late sea-farers and we don’t want to upset any of those.

Guy Salter - MCM

Estocolmo, Suecia (18 de noviembre, 2008) - La segunda etapa de la Volvo Ocean Race ya está en su cuarto día y los dos barcos de Ericsson Racing Team están empleando una estrategia que les posiciona en el Sur lo cual les puede hacer llegar a la meta volante como los dos primeros barcos.

En el informe de posiciones de las 1300 GMT de hoy, el Ericsson 3 de Anders Lewander estaba en cuarta posición, a 20 millas náuticas de los líderes de la flota, Telefónica Azul y Puma, que estaban a 3.513 millas del final de etapa. El líder de la general, el Ericsson 4 de Torben Grael era quinto, a 28 millas de los líderes.

Una clara dicvisión se ha producido en la flota, con un paquete más al norte y otro más al sur. Los barcos de Ericsson lideraban el paquete del sur y separaban el norte y el sur por unas 14 millas. Su posición significa menos distancia hasta la meta volante situada en la longitud 085E, pero significa también más distancia hasta el final en Cochin, India, comparados con los barcos más al norte, que están a unas 80 millas.

“Ericsson 3 parece un poco mejor posicionado a largo plazo. Ericsson 4 se ha ido un poco demasiado lejos al sur y podría trasluchar detrás de Ericsson 3 en algún momento,” dijo Chris Bedford, meteorólogo de Ericsson Racing Team. “Existe incluso la posibilidad de que Ericsson 3 lo haga un poco mejor aquí y venza a Ericsson 4 en la línea de puntuación en algún momento manana por tarde. Las próximas 36 horas serán decisivas.”

La elección de los barcos de Ericsson Racing Team les ha posicionado para sumar los puntos en la meta volante y ponerse al este de la flota para coger los trade winds del Índico y tener buenas condiciones hacia el final. El plan no se podrá comprobar hasta dentro de unos cinco días, cuando la flota haya pasado la meta volante y se dirija al norte.

Las condiciones de navegación son extremadamente duras y la vida no es agradable a bordo. Muchos tripulantes están sufriendo resfriados que agarraron en Sudáfrica. El mar picado contra el que han estado peleando con vientos del este sudeste contra una fuerte corriente se suma a los problemas.

El Green Dragon informó hoy de una botavara rota. Muchos barcos han roto velas. A pesar de ello Ericsson 4 pudo hacer el mejor tiempo de la flota en las pasadas 24 horas con 490 millas. La tripulación internacional navegaba con un Código Cero fraccionado, foque y a tope de mayor, pero no ha podido evitar incidentes.

“Tuvimos algunos problemas con algunas velas hace unos días, pero ahora todo va bien a bordo”, dijo Guy Salter, el glardonado tripulante de medios de Ericsson 4.

Salter ha estado en su litera desde la primera noche de la etapa cuando se le presentó una gripe que piensa que le contagió su hija. Acabo de tomar mi primera comida hace unas pocas horas”, dijo Salter. “HAce bastante frío a borod. Los chicos levan la mayor partre del equipo puesto y se puede ver el aliento en el interior del barco”.

A bordo del Ericsson 3, el navegante Aksel Magdahl dijo que inundaron e barco cuando dieron contra una ola a 35 nudos.

“El agua se metió dentro y llenó el barco casi hasta nuestras rodillas”, dijo Magdahl, que está disputando su primera Volvo Ocean Race. “Costó unos 20 minutos vaciar el barco, pero los equipos electrónicos parecen no estar bien”.

Se debe elogiar la marinería de los regatistas de la Volvo Ocean Race porque virtualmente nadan alrededor del mundo. Las velocidades de los barcos son tan rápidas que las cubiertas están constantemente
inundadas de agua. El problema es cuando se estrellan contra una ola. La velocidad cae significativamente y aumenta la carga de la jarcia.

Not to sound like I am whinging, but I think I will anyway.

Last night sucked. OR it was great –if you are a boat builder or a sailmaker looking for work. Yikes. The proverbial ‘you know what’ hit the fan when we got about as vertical in a sailboat as you ever want to be going down a big dark wave that sort of snuck up on us. And, when going straight down a big wave the inevitable bow crash is coming into the wave in front. But this time was different. Not only did the bow crash into the wave but the prod, the bow pulpit and about 15 feet up the Asymmetric Spinnaker we had up at the time. Bang. Spinnaker in many pieces and a long night for Justin Ferris.

Fortunately, we had the broken sail down and a new sail up in about 10 minutes. And we tweaked our angle and were going faster so all good right?

Wrong.

About an hour later after a watch change, we found another beauty of a wave except this one had no face in front of it and —whoosh. Take off! The inevitable silence of a boat that feels like it is literally flying, followed up with a massive SMASH into the not very soft Indian Ocean. But this one was different from the other 10,872 smashes that have occurred over the past 48 hours or so.

This one had a horrid CRACK along with it. I was working with Justin on the sail at the time and had on my headlamp and ran to the bow to quickly find several cracks in our longitudinal frames in the bow section. And, for those laymen out there, essentially these frames are the spine of the boat, which doesn’t allow it to fold in half. And they also don’t allow the bow to cave in when we hit waves. Kind of important piece to the puzzle.

Well, we are better now. Seven hours later. Bow repaired thanks to Casey Smith and Mickey Muller, and the kite back in one piece thanks to Justin. All the rest of the team filling in with sailing duties and helping repair when asked. Big effort and a feeling of complete exhaustion as well as satisfaction that we are back in the game and going full speed again.

Distance lost is always painful, but I think it could have been much worse.
We are still in the hunt and thanks to the effort of all the boys, we are whole again. We aren’t exactly in the position we want to be on the racetrack any more, but time will only tell how much it costs us. I figure it cost us only about 30 miles on the racetrack.

Another painful part of this escapade is that we happened to be lit up when everything went pear shaped. Had been the best boat in a few position reports in a row and were feeling really good about our spot on the track. Oh well, part of life.

So I am looking for anything lucky at this point to kill the breakdown curse. Brought out my lucky rock, looking for a lucky dolphin to escort us and there is a lucky albatross that has been following us for about two hours. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a lucky albatross but I just invented it so it must be true. Very cool.

So my whinge is over. Sorry you had to be a part of it. I feel better getting it off my chest. The competitive side of all of us HATES to lose miles..

Time to try and make them back up.

Ken Read - skipper

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