movistar prepares for third leg

by Alejandro Varela on 11 Feb 2006 The third leg of the Volvo Ocean Race will start Sunday at 02:00 GMT in Melbourne with a 1450 n.m course that will reach Wellington, New Zealand.

Today has been a quiet day for the ‘movistar’ team, and a meeting concerning the route that will be taken has been the only thing the team has had scheduled.

Each onboard crew members has checked the area they are responsible for and the shore crew has finished all the last minute tuning. The boat rests in the same dock where it arrived, after earning a third place classification in the second leg of the race that started in Cape Town.

Thanks to the third position won in the last In Port Race, ‘movistar’ will be the third boat to leave the waterfront. The Spanish team is scheduled to leave the waterfront area at 23:30 GMT, before heading to the Start Line.

When the team reaches New Zealand, the crew of the Spanish boat will have little time to rest before the start of the fourth leg that will take them from Wellington to Rio de Janeiro. ‘Even should we consider the leg as an independent one –notes Xabi Fernández, headsail trimmer for ‘movistar’–, we can think of the stop-over in Wellington as a ‘gate’ for the course to Rio. We are going to spend almost 48 hours there before we head on 6700 n.m. on a course that will take us from Wellington to Rio de Janeiro –Brazil–’.

Pepe Ribes thinks about the difficulty of the leg: ‘It could be the hardest leg of this edition of the Volvo Ocean Race. It will be so short that we almost won't have enough time to rest before reaching Wellington.

The entire crew will help with the manoeuvres and the watch system will run differently. After crossing the finish line, and given that we needn't repair anything, we'll still have only a couple of days to rest before facing the next leg –and it includes Cape Horn-. Should we need to repair something, we won't have the shore crew to help out. That would mean that we wouldn't be able to rest before heading to Brazil.