Portimão Global Ocean Race leader grinds to a halt

by Oliver Dewar on 19 Jun 2009
In the 0320 UTC position poll this morning (18/06), the front runner in the Portimão Global Ocean Race, Desafio Cabo de Hornos, hit a light zone blocking the route to the finish line on the southern coast of Portugal.

As the Chilean team ground to a halt, Herrmann and Oehme kept the breeze taking 52 miles from Cubillos and Muñoz since the Chilean team began to slow down on Wednesday afternoon, while Jeremy Salvesen and David Thomson on Team Mowgli - holding third place – gained 34 miles on Desafio Cabo de Hornos since yesterday afternoon. In completely different breeze, 30 miles west of Flores in the Azores Archipelago, solo sailor Michel Kleinjans and Open 40 Roaring Forty were making 4.1 knots as the Belgian yachtsman commits to sailing through the group of mid-Atlantic islands.

Since dawn, the Chilean team have gradually picked up speed although their lead has been eroded and at 1220 UTC, Desafio Cabo de Hornos leads Beluga Racer by 81 miles with Team Mowgli trailing the Chilean Class 40 by 252 miles. Felipe Cubillos and José Muñoz must now drop 428 miles south-east towards Portimão and the finish of Leg 5. Slightly under 600 miles further west, solo sailor Michel Kleinjans has slowed to 1.3 knots as he negotiates the wind shadow cast by Flores with Roaring Forty currently just 10 miles off Ponta das Lajes on the island’s southern tip.

Current weather models suggest that the Chilean team are in just under 11 knots of breeze north-easterly breeze and these reaching conditions should carry the Chilean and German teams towards Portugal until a possible light patch as the race leaders approach Cabo de Saõ Vincente on the south-western tip of Portugal before turning the corner and heading directly for Portimão.

Despite making significant gains on the double-handed leader and currently making good speed at 7.2 knots, the British duo of Jeremy Salvesen and David Thomson have been preoccupied with electronics issues on board Team Mowgli: 'Late on Monday afternoon the autopilot suddenly stopped working, jamming the rudder amidships and nearly causing us to accidentally gybe,' reports Salvesen. Mysteriously, the pilot re-engaged, but not for long. 'Well, in the afternoon, it packed up for good and we spent a couple of hours trying to track down the problem with the help of NKE in France,' he continues. 'We ran new wires direct from the main batteries to the pilot motor, bypassing the computers, and were able to confirm that the problem lay with the motor itself.' The duo attempted to dismantle the motor, but without detailed diagrams of this complex unit, the prospect of hand steering for the remainder of the race seemed high.

'So, we went onto our two hours on/off watch system and as the drizzle continued, night fell and the fog came down, life became steadily more miserable,' explains Salvesen. 'Helming at night isn't easy at the best of times, particularly with heavy cloud cover, but driving in fog is especially hard. There are no reference points whatsoever so you rely completely on the instruments to tell you the direction of the wind and your course. The problem is that these have a built-in time lag, so it is very easy to drive a horrible zig-zag course.'

However, on Wednesday morning, salvation appeared in the shape of a technical diagram of the failed equipment emailed by the autopilot’s manufacturers, NKE: 'We were finally able to take it to pieces and have a look inside,' says a very relieved Salvesen. 'At last, we had found the source of the problem - one of the wires inside had come free which would explain the intermittent nature of the fault. Fixing the wire was straightforward, putting the motor back together again, a nightmare!'

By midday, the unit was fixed and the duo celebrated with bacon and eggs and with morale high, Salvesen and Thomson carried on with the daily job list. 'After breakfast we set too, fixing the chafed and delaminated areas on our sails with relative ease - not as bad a job as we had feared,' confirms the British skipper. 'David went up on a halyard and worked his way down the leech of the Solent with sticky-backed patches and within a couple of hours we were ready to power up again - not that it makes a huge difference in 5 knots of breeze…'

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