Volvo Ocean Race - Team Alvimedica goes to school

by Amory Ross, Team Alvimedica on 17 Oct 2014 Today we went to school in the Volvo Ocean Race. Penthouse to the outhouse, we lost a ton of miles—heaps—and by and large everyone was very aware of it all the time. But the challenges of the last 24 hours are already being viewed as a chance to improve; that quality is going to be one of this team’s biggest assets moving forward.

Charlie has been keeping a sailing log, specific enough that after the crazy couple of cloud-driven, unpredictably random days of weather weirdness—conditions that reward patience and luck more so than your ability to physically sail a boat well through the water—he recorded his optimism: 'Day four, happy to return to expected gradient sailing where we can start to actually sail the boat.' Charlie’s next log entry reads something along the lines of 'And we’re extremely slow.'

Quote Charlie Enright: 'Day four, happy to return to expected gradient sailing where we can start to actually sail the boat.'

Slow we were, but there were also some valuable lessons to learn about how we sail the boat (or rather: how we shouldn’t). That’s the beauty of one-design sailing: when you’re going slowly it probably means that you could be doing something more. And if you have the ability to understand what it is, and you make tangible changes to improve it, that’s all part of moving up the learning curve. And that’s exactly what happened. We abandoned the low and slow mode, we moved our weight forward, and we acknowledged the offshore lane wasn’t working.

This is a very long leg and no one is out of contention. There are still many obstacles on the way to Cape Town and these kinds of days, while tough at times to accept, they’re all part of the process. Team Alvimedica’s goal is to continue improving and I think this team is mindful that days like yesterday are a big part of that. No Team Alvimedica