Difficult sailing, illness and shredded sails -VOR

by Various Volvo Ocean Race competitors on 19 Nov 2008
Boat Blogs from Day 4 of the Volvo Ocean Race, leg 2 from Cape Town to Cochin, India.

TELEFÓNICA BLACK LEG TWO DAY 4 QFB: received 18.11.08 1454 GMT

Hi everybody

This is the fourth day at sea, and we are holding a nice third place. Here we go the BLACKIES!

After a really difficult night, dealing with big breeze and nice swell mixed with crossed waves, dawn saw us hitting up to +30 knots on the right heading. We were supposed to start heading up but things change abruptly here in the Indian Ocean.

Yesterday we could observe a scary black cloud forming out of the blue, and the immediate call was ‘EVERYBODY ON DECK!’, as you may imagine. The moments were of expectation, as we saw it coming straight towards our starboard beam, but, in the end, we managed to pass ahead of it by less than half mile, we thought. When we could see the white spray on our stern you can be assured we took a deep breath of relief. I promise.

The fleet is now split in two, four boats about 60 miles south of the other group, in which both Telefónica boats are, and anything may happen. The southern boats may go a bit faster but a bit apart from the route north, and it all will depend on how to manage the less wind expected.

Apart from that, the crew is as always, as crazy as nuts and everybody proud of each other, working a lot and enjoying sailing in the Southern Ocean.

Let's hope it goes on at least as it is now. Third place is not so bad,

GO BLACKIES!
Mikel Pasabant - MCM
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PUMA LEG TWO DAY 4 QFB: received 18.11.08 1057 GMT

Not to sound like I am whinging, but I think I will anyway.

Last night sucked. OR it was great --if you are a boat builder or a sailmaker looking for work. Yikes. The proverbial ‘you know what’ hit the fan when we got about as vertical in a sailboat as you ever want to be going down a big dark wave that sort of snuck up on us. And, when going straight down a big wave the inevitable bow crash is coming into the wave in front. But this time was different. Not only did the bow crash into the wave but the prod, the bow pulpit and about 15 feet up the Asymmetric Spinnaker we had up at the time. Bang. Spinnaker in many pieces and a long night for Justin Ferris.

Fortunately, we had the broken sail down and a new sail up in about 10 minutes. And we tweaked our angle and were going faster so all good right?

Wrong.

About an hour later after a watch change, we found another beauty of a wave except this one had no face in front of it and ---whoosh. Take off! The inevitable silence of a boat that feels like it is literally flying, followed up with a massive SMASH into the not very soft Indian Ocean. But this one was different from the other 10,872 smashes that have occurred over the past 48 hours or so.

This one had a horrid CRACK along with it. I was working with Justin on the sail at the time and had on my headlamp and ran to the bow to quickly find several cracks in our longitudinal frames in the bow section. And, for those laymen out there, essentially these frames are the spine of the boat, which doesn't allow it to fold in half. And they also don't allow the bow to cave in when we hit waves. Kind of important piece to the puzzle.

Well, we are better now. Seven hours later. Bow repaired thanks to Casey Smith and Mickey Muller, and the kite back in one piece thanks to Justin. All the rest of the team filling in with sailing duties and helping repair when asked. Big effort and a feeling of complete exhaustion as well as satisfaction that we are back in the game and going full speed again.

Distance lost is always painful, but I think it could have been much worse.
We are still in the hunt and thanks to the effort of all the boys, we are whole again. We aren't exactly in the position we want to be on the racetrack any more, but time will only tell how much it costs us. I figure it cost us only about 30 miles on the racetrack.

Another painful part of this escapade is that we happened to be lit up when everything went pear shaped. Had been the best boat in a few position reports in a row and were feeling really good about our spot on the track. Oh well, part of life.

So I am looking for anything lucky at this point to kill the breakdown curse. Brought out my lucky rock, looking for a lucky dolphin to escort us and there is a lucky albatross that has been following us for about two hours. I don't know if there is such a thing as a lucky albatross but I just invented it so it must be true. Very cool.

So my whinge is over. Sorry you had to be a part of it. I feel better getting it off my chest. The competitive side of all of us HATES to lose miles..

Time to try and make them back up.

Ken Read - skipper
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GREEN DRAGON LEG TWO DAY 4 QFB: received 1013 GMT

Again, I would have to be here to believe it. The Agulhas Current snakes around like a giant serpent and with every twist it throws up either a good or bad current and an ever changing sea state. All we can do is to try to minimise the time we spend in the bad bits and maximise the good. At least it is warm water so life on deck though wet is not too bad.

'OK sailing boffins why is a Chinese gybe called a Chinese gybe? Nobody on the Green Dragon knows and I kind of feel we should.'

Ian Walker - skipper
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DELTA LLOYD LEG THREE DAY 4 QFB: received 18.11.08 0327 GMT

I thought I’d be feeling better by today. I was right. We changed sails earlier today to our high-clew reacher - ‘the R1’. We are sailing in 25 to 40 knots of wind and 8 meter high waves. It’s a wild and bumpy ride. The surf is up.

Our sail change came with some adventure. We use our J4, a small jib fore sail that flies on a furler off our staysail halyard, almost all of the time, when sailing downwind. During our sail change, the tack pin that connects the furling unit, and sail, to the deck of the boat broke.

Imagine sailing in 30 knots of wind with the head (top corner) and clue (back corner) of the sail still attached, while the tack (bottom corner) whips around violently with an 3kg metal furling unit attached to the tail end of it. As we tried to wrestle the sail to the deck someone said ‘boy, this is dangerous’…he was exactly right.

I’ve been dreading writing the blog entry to describe the strategy and route to India. I don’t think that I can do it with a simple screen shot and words alone. I think that I would need a 20-slide PowerPoint deck and live commentary, to capture the complete strategy…this route is complicated and has about five moving parts.

Being adaptable and managing risk is going to be the winning solution in this leg. To give a simple version:

Right now, we are sailing on the backside of a low-pressure system. This system is allowing us to get east very quickly, due to the southwest winds in this section of the system. We will head almost due east and past the scoring gate. For this leg, our mid scoring gate is the Longitude 58 E. The furthest boats to the east will pick up the most points at this mid-leg gate.

Just about the time we arrive at the scoring gate, the wind will shift to the northwest, as another low-pressure system catches up with us. This will allow us to turn to a northeasterly course. We will follow this system for a day and a half as we head towards the prevailing east trade winds that live north of 30 latitude.

The transition from the northwesterly winds that are driven by the low-pressure system and the east trades could be a bit rough. I’ll spend the next several days working out the details of how we are going to play the shift from one weather system to the next. Currently, we are too far away from that point, and I don’t have all the information I need yet to make a call this early. We’ll stay adaptable in the mean time…

The easterly trade wind