Volvo Ocean Race - Bad for your heart

by Stefan Coppers on 22 May 2015 Yesterday, on the boat, I got an email from my father. He could no longer bring himself to look at the Volvo Ocean Race tracker . “Team Brunel is doing well. I hope that you can now hold onto the lead for once,” he wrote. Indeed I hope that he hasn’t been looking at it anymore. It’s bad for your heart. Our 20-mile lead has vanished already.

Bouwe and Jens had warned us about it. “The other boats are coming up from behind and are bringing the new wind with them! So they’re laughing all the way,” said Jens.

“Thanks, Jens,” I reply, ironically. “Highly motivating as always. It’s like the captain of my football team saying at half-time ‘Lads, we might be leading 3-0 now but we’ll probably be drawing in no time’.” “But what if you lose three defenders in the second half?” Jens retorts. “Then you’d be happy if it stayed 3-3.”

And indeed this morning we are not sailing with three men less but five. The Atlantic Ocean is as calm as a lake in Holland: as flat as a snooker table. At least it is where we are! The men on deck glance nervously at the horizon, from where the other boats are expected to appear. The sails flap fitfully. We’re talking in whispers. As the mist lifts, we first see an irritating little red dot approaching. “That’s MAPFRE.” Then we see a yellow dot, then another red dot and finally an orange dot. Apart from the ladies, the entire fleet has appeared on the horizon! And they’re heading towards us in convoy. In no time at all, the score is 3-3. The Spaniards come out on top. The red boat cuts across our path and then, to our great irritation, remains just 50 metres in front of us. “They may be friends, they may be out of the race, but not right now,” grumbles Pablo Arrarte about his compatriots.

Benefitting from the same wind, skipper Bouwe Bekking’s men quickly take the situation in hand. The boat even seems to be slightly faster than the boat in front of us. However, the Spaniards are not going to give up their newly acquired lead position without a fight. Once again, we have a match race on the Atlantic Ocean! If we want to cut across them, they turn into our path. It’s getting hard to overtake them. This is no time for niceties because this dawdling is bringing the other three boats ever nearer.

Then Louis Balcaen takes over the helm from skipper Bouwe Bekking, and once again our youngest crew member seems to have golden hands. “Quick! They’re not looking,” jokes our navigator Capey but in fact the young Belgian does take advantage of a moment’s inattention by the Spaniards to slide ahead of them. As if he’s sailing a Laser over a lake, Balcaen catches three good waves and within a few minutes the black and yellow ocean racer has surfed ahead of its rival. “The muscles from Brussels!” shout the men on deck, joyfully. The modest Belgian blushes and laughs. With a fresh wind, Team Brunel now steams ahead and retakes that precious first place. A fresh wind instead of being caught in the mangle with MAPFRE and Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing.

Tonight my father can look at the tracker with an easy mind because we’re still in the lead. But for how long? You never know in this Volvo Ocean Race.