Bekking reveals Telefonica Blue a handful downwind

by Riath Al-Samarrai on 4 Nov 2008
Sometimes you laugh if you do not want to cry and that must have been the rationale behind Telefonica Blue’s late change of arrival music. ‘We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine’, blared The Beatles from the PA system as Bouwe Bekking’s boat trundled into Cape Town in fifth place.

It was a nod to their troublesome boat, a craft which has a tendency to pitch bow-down below the water when running downwind.

Such was the amount of water on deck, the team’s navigator Simon Fisher even added a periscope to the team’s job list for this short stopover. Gallows humour aside, it has also caused Bekking to have some concern that his team, so dominant in the light winds of the Alicante in-port race, will struggle when the strong winds go aft.

'We are really good in the light and medium and reaching in the strong conditions. Reaching we were fast,' he said. 'But downwind we just buried the bow, we just went too much under the water.

'It’s not a big concern but it’s a thing we have to live with. We can’t push it as hard as the other guys can because you have to surf to keep it in one piece.

'We didn’t expect to be that much bow down but I think overall we had some good phases in some conditions so it gives us a lot of hope for the future.'

Fisher added: 'It was only the downwind stuff we found slightly harder than expected. Every other time were always gaining miles on the leaders. On the whole, we are very happy with the boat.

'We have learnt our lessons, which when you are not expecting them are hard to take. We had to throttle back a little earlier than we were expecting, but we are learning about this boat and how to make it go faster.'

The team’s cause was not helped by conditions which Bekking claimed were unusual for the route. 'In the overall conditions that the Farr office has looked at, we thought we came up with a really good concept,' he explained. 'This leg was a lot of running and normally there is a lot of reaching involved from Fernando de Noronha past Rio (de Janeiro), but basically it was two days of reaching and then it was over. Then it was running again.'

Irrespective of the limitations, Bekking insists his boat has sufficient strengths elsewhere to mount a solid challenge at the top of the leaderboard. Part of his optimism – derived also from his fourth place position in the standings, four points off Ericsson 4 – was his team’s response to their early stop in Gibraltar. They took a 12-hour penalty after sustaining rudder damage on the first night, but recovered to be in the pack going into the Doldrums.

He said: 'Coming back we passed boats which gives us a lot of confidence. We know the next couple of legs will be relatively light and it seems to be the light air where we have done really, really well.'

The skipper confirmed an investigation will now take place into their rudders which, like those on sister ship Telefonica Black, suffered damage. He said: 'I don’t know what happened to the other boat. I have to speak with them and see what happened. The numbers looked alright but it’s something we have to assess during the stop.'

Beyond damage to the rudders, bowman Pepe Ribes revealed the boat coped well with the conditions. 'We have a very small job list,' he said. 'The rudders need to be looked at and a sail had problems, but the list is very manageable.'

Bekking added: 'We blew one sail two or three days after we left Gibraltar and that sail has been repaired and blown up three times until we ran out of material.'

Their smaller sails were also called into action on account of the bow-pitching issue. The skipper said: 'Sailing a lot of time with a smaller sail, like a 180 square meters smaller than you would like, because you have to sail higher than the other guys and try to keep the damage as small as possible.'

The talking then stopped and so did the music. Bekking, as usual, smiled. 'There are plenty of conditions where we are really fast, so I am not concerned. Our boat has a lot to offer.'

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