Black Pearl is first Volvo 70 into Cape Town

by Paul Cayard, Pirates of the Caribbean on 1 Dec 2005 From: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN LEG ONE
Pirate Update-November 28, 2005

The Black Pearl arrived in Cape Town on November 27 after an uneventful flight on the Antonov 124.

She was then transported to 'Pirate City', in the harbor area, which will be our base of operations for the next four weeks. We again want to thank our partner Pescanova for their generous and useful support to the team by making the flight to Cape Town possible.

The shore team is arriving in Cape Town this week after getting a well deserved week off. Basically they had gone hard since early August without a break. The crew is taking this week off and will arrive in Cape Town December 7th. The goals of this week are for the shore team to install the new wedges and bomber doors for the keel and finish up a few other jobs on the boat. The plan is to be sailing by the 10th and then go offshore on the 12th for a few days of ocean sailing and sea trialing to make sure all is well with the repairs. Leg 2 will be one of the most demanding of the race for both the boat and the crew physically. I don’t think either can possibly be over prepared so I think we are using our bit of bad luck on Leg 1 to gain a leg up on Leg 2.

After we return, we will then have two events on the 16th and 17th December. On the 16th we will have a presentation of the team and the boat to 1000 school children of Cape Town. On the 17th we have a corporate sailing day for Disney.
The next race for us is the in-port race on December 26th. Obviously, we will be looking to get some good scores in the next few races to try to recover what we lost on leg one. As I said before, this is a long event and there may be other breakdowns.

Here are all the events in this race and the points that are available from each. As you can see, there are a lot of scoring events beyond leg 1

SCORING POINTS
IN PORT WAY POINTS LEG POINTS CUMULATIVE PTS
In port Sanxenxo 3.5 3.5
Noronha 3.5 7
Cape Town 7 14
In port Cape Town 3.5 17.5
Kerguelen 3.5 21
Eclipse Islands 3.5 24.5
Melbourne 7 31.5
In port Melbourne 3.5 35
Wellington 7 42
Cape Horn 3.5 45.5
Rio 7 52.5
In port Rio 3.5 56
Noronha 3.5 59.5
Baltimore 7 66.5
In port Baltimore 3.5 70
New York 7 77
Lizard 3.5 80.5
Portsmouth 7 87.5
In port Portsmouth 3.5 91
Rotterdam 7 98
In port Rotterdam 3.5 101.5
Gothenburg 7 108.5

We feel good about the work that has been done on the boat and we are looking forward to getting back to sailing soon.

Paul Cayard – Skipper
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