Volvo Ocean Race - Legends- Wings clipped but still racing

by Volvo Ocean Race on 1 Oct 2010 In part two of Ceramco New Zealand's spectacular dismasting during leg one of the Whitbread 1981-82, skipper Peter Blake has called his crew together to discuss the options.

Read Part I: http://www.volvooceanrace.com/news/article/2010/september/ceramco-part-I/!Destruction_Derby.

‘Our best solution was to continue on to Cape Town by the downwind route, around the back (to the west) of the South Atlantic high-pressure systems, making as much speed as possible and have everything waiting for us to replace the rig when we got there.

‘We were right in the middle of the Atlantic anyway. The African coast to the east, was to windward against the trade winds. We didn't really have much of a decision to make. But I got a big thrill from the crew reaction to this discussion. There was no question of pulling out to motor to Cape Town. We were still racing, albeit with our wings clipped.

'It would be up to good old Kiwi ingenuity to find ways of setting as much sail as possible to speed our journey. We would be sailing anything from one thousand to two thousand miles further, but the Trades had been blowing reasonably fresh and, with a few breaks, we could still make reasonable time.

‘In our favour was the way the mast had broken. We had a 45-foot top section with all the attachments intact. If we could hoist this into place alongside the 16-foot bottom section and hold it in position, there were all sorts of possibilities. We could still make it to Cape Town before some of the backmarkers.

‘I tried to wrap up the discussion on a light note, saying 'Now if anyone wants to get demoralised, come and see me and we'll get demoralised together!'. There were no takers.

‘Left to my own thoughts, I reflected on our misfortune. Our estimates put Flyer 105 miles to the east of us. We had been level-pegging down the South Atlantic and really beginning to look good on handicap.

‘Then there was the mast itself, slim in section and heavily tapered at the top. It caused a lot of comment when it was stepped in Auckland and there were any number of waterfront experts prepared to bet it would come down. Well, it had - but through no fault in the spar or its engineering. The problem was a rigging failure. It wouldn't have mattered what size mast we'd had - we could have been using a telegraph pole. When that particular piece of rigging failed, whatever we had been using would have come down.

‘We'd had no problems from the spar in 16,000 miles of sailing. It had stood up like a tree trunk, even when we had been caught napping by a 50-knot squall leaving Auckland for the 1980 Sydney-Hobart. On that occasion, we gybed all-standing with no runners on and finished up kicking on our side with the mast in the water. If it was going to go, through any fault in its section size, design or engineering, it would have been then.

‘But there was little point in recriminations. Better now to devote all our thinking energy to getting out of this dilemma in the best possible shape, remembering always that there was still more than three-quarters of the race to run and a lot could happen to the opposition in more than 20,000 miles, particularly in the Southern Ocean where Ceramco had been designed and built to excel. Hopefully, we had now used up our ration of bad luck.

‘For now, we were going to go back to what they used in Nelson's day. If we could rig the boat the way we intended and get the same wind that we had been having, we would be doing seven to eight knots again. We wouldn't be as hard on the wind as we would have liked, but we would be able to steer a pretty good course and reach Cape Town not too far behind the others.'

Epilogue

The Ceramco New Zealand team did not give up and were the 18th boat to finish in Cape Town. Flyer was first across the finish line in Cape Town with a course record and 52 hours ahead of the second boat, Charles Heidsieck III. Flyer's time was two days and 10 hours faster than the first Flyer four years earlier and a new record for the sailing time between England and Cape Town.

The last boat to finish leg one, eight days after the start of the second leg was Vivanapoli, who strayed into Angolan territorial waters and were boarded by officials from an Angolan gunboat. On seeing the crew's South African passports, it was surmised that they were spies. Skipper Beppe Panada did not help their cause by throwing the immigration officer overboard.

After warning shots were fired, the entire crew was arrested and taken to Luanda where they spent seven days imprisoned. The delay cost them all chance of competing on the Southern Ocean stages, so they crossed the Atlantic to Mar del Plata, Argentina, to join the fleet for the last leg home.

If you know where any of the boats that competed in The Whitbread 1981-82 are, email the Volvo Ocean Race office at legends@volvooceanrace.com.

Peter Blake's account of Ceramco's dismasting is an excerpt from Ocean Conquest, the official story of the Whitbread Round the World Race by Bob Fisher and Barry Pickthall.