Volvo Ocean Race - Recap leg five

by Team Brunel - Robbert-Jan Metselaar on 8 Apr 2015 Volvo Ocean Race - A warm breeze blows through the restaurant of the small pousada Villa Balangan in Itajaí. In the distance, the waves of the warm southern Atlantic Ocean are breaking on a dazzling white beach. While children play football in the street, the sailors of Team Brunel are eating their first decent breakfast in nineteen days. Together, the crew look back on the last leg.

“I still have the feeling that we could have come second or third,” says Dirk de Ridder. “We harried the three leaders for three days. Unfortunately, we didn’t succeed in overtaking them and that’s frustrating. The differences in speed between these boats are so small that every little mistake is punished mercilessly.”

The leg started with great sailing conditions. “During the first couple of days, the temperature was pleasant, there was enough wind and the sea was pretty flat. Unfortunately that didn’t last long because two days later all hell broke loose. Cyclone Pam had left us with gigantic waves. Everything was immediate soaked through. I was seasick for a bit, but once you get used to it, you can eat normally again and you don’t have any more problems. At that point, we were in first place with a lead of 50 miles on number two. This was also the point when navigator Andrew Cape predicted that that the whole fleet would bunch together at the ice gates.”

“Up to the start of the ice gate, we were literally hitching a lift on the back of Cyclone Pam towards Cape Horn,” adds Gerd-Jan Poortman. “You could think of it as a big wave on which six surfers are riding, all heading towards the beach. In this case, the wave was Cyclone Pam, the surfers were the Volvo Ocean Race boats and the beach was the ice gate. Because the ice gate was set so high, we were forced to leave the wave earlier than we would have liked.

After all, the weather system is not controlled by an ice gate, so you can’t sail the ideal route. Without the ice gate, we would have just surfed on southwards and maybe we could have held onto our lead. We were the first to leave the wave. The rest of them could still benefit from the wind, so the gap closed very quickly, until they too were thrown off the wave. This is when the leg started all over again.”

A day before Team Brunel should have rounded Cape Horn, the team had to cope with a major setback. “All of the electronics failed at the same time,” says Dirk de Ridder. “We were then sailing blind in the pitch black with a 20-knot wind. That cost us 10 miles at least. Finally we rounded Cape Horn in third place.”

After rounding the Cape, Team Brunel was faced with an unexpected storm. “There came a point when the wind was blowing at a constant 50 knots. Storm force ten in the Southern Ocean is no picnic, I can tell you! There were thousands of litres of ice-cold water washing over the boat. And the boat was more lying flat than upright. That’s when the J1 foresail tore. Because we were involved in a bitter fight with MAPFRE at the time, we reefed too late. With an alternative sail configuration, we could have kept up with the three leading boats, but against the wind without the J1 sail, we lacked the bit of speed needed to catch up with them.”

According to Jens Dolmer, who had sailed this leg once before, the difference with the previous time was that he now had to sail flat out. “In my time with Ericsson, we had a big lead on the other boats so there came a point when we could take things easy without losing our lead. I wasn’t scared but I do have respect for the ocean. If you’re afraid, you stop thinking ahead and that’s dangerous for yourself and your team.”

Gerd-Jan thinks that it was a very nice but, at the same time, a very boring leg. “You put on your sailing suit, eat and then go up on deck. Your suit is cold and wet on the inside. It takes about twenty minutes to warm up. After the shift, you go below again to sleep. On deck you could hardly talk to each other because the wind was blowing too hard. It was also physically demanding. If I stretch out now, I get cramp in my back.”

“A few miles before the finish, we almost caught up with Alvimedica. If we had just followed them, we would never have caught up so we had to do something. We had nothing to lose. The only option that we had was to gybe twice so that we were slightly upwind. We had hoped that Alvimedica would sail into an area of calm, in which case, we could have overtaken it.”

Although Gerd-Jan is very disappointed with the result, he also thinks that the team did some things very well. “We didn’t have any Chinese gybes, the boat remained intact and nobody got injured. After rounding Cape Horn, Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing was more than 50 miles ahead of us and yet when we crossed the finish in Itajaí yesterday, the lead had shrunk to 13 miles. Everything still seems to be falling into place for Abu Dhabi. That’s hard to swallow and difficult to explain to people on shore. Sometimes even I don’t fully understand why we’ve sailed a particular course or carried out a particular manoeuvre. My work mostly takes place in the bow and after my watch I go to sleep. I’ve full confidence in our navigator Andrew Cape.”