Sport-heute: Sailing - GREEN DRAGON BREAKS BOOM AS CONDITIONS TURN WILD

18. November 2008, 16:47

GREEN DRAGON BREAKS BOOM AS CONDITIONS TURN WILD

The past 24-hours have been the most testing in the Volvo Ocean Race so far, as the fleet battled high winds and a confused sea on leg two to Cochin in India. The worst effected was the Green Dragon team (Ian Walker/GBR), who broke their boom shortly before 1100 GMT this morning. This came after they survived a spectacular Chinese gybe yesterday.

CAPE TOWN - CHOCIN INDIA (mk) n a short email, skipper Ian Walker/GBR said, 'I am sorry to report that we have just broken our boom in a 50-knot squall. We are in the process of recovering the parts. The situation is under control with no harm or risk to anyone. We are carrying on downwind.'

The crew is all safe and unhurt and in contact with their shore team. They are currently 1500 nautical miles from Mauritius (9,41.17S, 40,28.73E ) and are sailing under jury rig.
Ian Walker says that the notorious 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. Throughout the fleet, destruction has been rife.

PUMA, Ken Read's red and black boat, has been another casualty. He says wryly that last night would have been great if you were a sailmaker or a boatbuilder looking for work. After blowing their asymmetric spinnaker into pieces, an hour later the boat took off.

'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 was followed by 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 ran to the bow to quickly find several cracks in our longitudinal frames in the bow section. 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 boat to cave in when we hit waves. Kind of important piece to the puzzle,' Read said.

Seven hours later, and the bow has been repaired onboard, and the spinnaker has been patched back together. 'Big effort and a feeling of complete exhaustion as well as satisfaction that we are back in the game and going full speed again,' Read said.

Further back in the fleet, Telefónica Blue (Bouwe Bekking/NED) blew out a spinnaker. Not unusual in itself but the crew is suffering from sickness onboard and repairing the damaged sail down below in huge seas was a big challenge; Daryl Wislang/NZL and Jordi Calafat/ESP needed one hand for the spinnaker and the other hand for the bucket they were throwing up into. 'Shows how strong a character they have,' Bouwe Bekking said. Today, the spinnaker was still in bits and will take another 10 hours to fix.

Onboard Team Russia, the crew suffered their first 'real, heavy, full-on massive flat-out broach'. 'The boat slowed down almost to a standstill, up to the mast in solid green water. Then, everything went into slow motion. Not a violent knock down, but the boat slowly turning, heeling more and more to wrong side, the boom high up in the air until coming over, and the kite flying around the forestay to the new leeward side and flapping in the 35 knots of breeze. Fate was inexorable, nothing left to be done, but wait for the inevitable,' describes skipper Andreas Hanakamp.

The stack of sails on the after starboard corner of the boat was under water, the starboard spreader camera as well as the keel, and the sails were holding the boat on 90 degrees to its designed flotation. Hanakamp climbed the vertical deck, as you would normally climb a rock, to free the runner. Wouter (Verbraak/NED navigator) handed him a knife to cut free the lashing. Cameron Wills/RSA pulled the runner tail with Oleg (Zherebtsov/RUS) grinding it. Meanwhile, Jeremy Elliott/IRL and Mikey Joubert/RSA managed to get the keel moving to the other side to right the boat. Luckily, none of the crew was hurt and only the pulpit was bent. There was no other damage.

In spite of the confused sea state, boat speeds hover around the 20-knot mark, with Ericsson 4 achieving 490 nm, the highest 24-hour run.

The fleet is effectively split in two, 115 nm across a north/south divide, with Telefónica Blue and Telefónica Black (Fernando EchÃ¡varri/ESP), PUMA and Delta Lloyd (Roberto Bermudez/ESP) in the north, and Team Russia, Ericsson 3 (Anders Lewander/SWE), Ericsson 4 (Torben Grael/BRA) and Green Dragon in the south.

Leg Two Day Four: 1300 GMT Volvo Ocean Race Positions
(boat name/country/skipper/nationality/distance to finish)

Telefónica Blue ESP (Bouwe Bekking/NED) DTF 3513 nm
PUMA Racing Team USA (Ken Read/USA) +0
Telefónica Black ESP (Fernando EchÃ¡varri/ESP) +15
Ericsson 3 SWE (Anders Lewander/SWE) +20
Ericsson 4 SWE (Torben Grael/BRA) +28
Green Dragon IRL/CHN (Ian Walker/GBR) +41
Delta Lloyd IRL (Roberto Bermudez/ESP) +80
Team Russia RUS (Andreas Hanakamp/AUT) +86

Position reports are issued daily at 1300 GMT by email; however, positions are updated every three hours on

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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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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 winds will then take us up to the doldrums. The last part of this leg is going to be very tricky. The monsoon season is changing off the coast of India so it's tough to know if we will finish in a southwest or a northeast monsoon weather pattern by the time we get up to India. I'm keeping an eye on it and following the trends closely. However, the decisions on the strategy for that section of the leg is still 10 days away.

In the meantime, we have some blistering fast sailing to do'

Matt Gregory - navigator

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TEAM RUSSIA LEG TWO DAY 4 QFB: received 18.11.08 0530

So often, when people in Cape Town realised I was involved with a team, I was asked about the race, wished well for the next leg and told how impressed people are with what we are doing. Start day showed this feeling amongst South Africans impressively. Our departure was a big thing for the citizens of the stopover as it was for us. I am already looking forward to coming back and hope to have more time; honestly, the stopover was much too short.

The triangle the fleet sailed was a great show, but we had been over ambitious trying to outsmart the rest of the fleet by tacking away and looking for more breeze offshore. The fleet slipped through under Table Mountain while we were left becalmed in the transition zone, sometimes seeing the breeze line just 50 metres away being unable to catch it. Only when the fleet was on the horizon, the Gods considered the price high enough and let us follow the pack.
Again, we were fighting the onboard technology for the first two days into the leg.

First, the keel developed its own habit of where to position itself and slowly but steadily dropped down. The drop rate increased and soon it was almost permanent pumping with the DC unit to keep it on max cant. Nick Bubb took the problem on and after manipulating the pressure relieve valves, the keel was under control.

Meanwhile Mark reported a buzzer
bothering him with an annoying noise, which should indicate an electrical power leak according to Livewire, the designers and manufacturers of the onboard media system. Not long after, we felt a slight electrical shock when touching the moist surface of the anti-slip pad on the navstation.

It took time to isolate electrical circuits and get to the ground of the problem. Only after switching off one Sat C, internal lighting and one GPS unit was there no measureable electrical potential between the hull and the batteries. Once the conditions get easier, I will try to solve the problem and have all systems up and running. All this distracts from racing, maybe it is part of the game called Volvo Ocean Race.

After 36 hours routine, sleep and watch patterns have settled once again and we are travelling with the fleet eastwards. The fleet has soon split into the northern and the southern group and it will be very interesting who is going to be favoured when finally pointing bows towards India.

Andreas Hanakamp - skipper

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TELEFÓNICA BLUE LEG TWO DAY 4 QFB: received 18.11.08 0707 GMT

The guys starting to feel a little better, but we're still one man down; Daryl (Wislang/NZL) is still not well. Jordi has been repairing the spinnaker, which is a nearly impossible task, as he gets bounced around in the bow.

We had some exciting sailing last night, with puffs up to 40 knots, hang on boys. Now the breeze is dropping, and our spinnaker is still in bits. It will take at least another 10 hours, so we will lose some distance. We have been hanging in ok, similar distance runs; it helps when you sail in the same piece of water. So not much happening, everybody is still a bit tired, as they have to stand in for the sailmakers. As well, the eating is not going too well yet for some of us, but hope this will go better in a few days.

Cheers,

Bouwe Bekking - skipper

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TEAM RUSSIA LEG TWO DAY 4: received 18.11.08 0906 GMT

In case you are wondering...

Waves roaring over the deck, intense loud slamming, and hanging on to your bunk whilst trying to catch some sleep. What's up? I thought this was meant to be a nice sub-tropical leg! Forget the champagne sailing, the only bubbles we are seeing are on the camera lenses. Forget the '80s look with shorts and T-shirts and ray-bans, think survival suits and helmets. Forget a nice foie-grass on toast, think 'how do I get as many calories as possible in without spilling the whole lot on the ceiling'.

My four-year old son keeps dragging us to the Volvo Dome to watch the Volvo movie. He loves the wild music, the pictures of waves exploding into white on the bow. For 10-minutes he doesn't blink and his mouth is wide open in amazement. In the mean time, my wife is holding back tears and grabs my hand tight. At the end of the movie, he asks: 'Daddy, you do all this for a trophy? Silly Daddy!' My wife in the meantime is thinking of the sleepless nights she will have when she knows we are pushing the boats down south with no help within days.

The Volvo is not just a bunch of guys racing their mates, it is a community of families travelling around the world, living the race every minute of the day. I keep this as a reminder to myself when I try to motivate myself to get out of the nice warm bunk and push hard again. On the boat, we are pulling the long straw with amazing surfs and crazy sailing. We are incredibly lucky with the support we get from our families, friends and shore crew who in the end make our dream possible.

We are completely under water again and conditions are extreme whilst we are blasting east. East? Yes, in case you are wondering, we did get the note from the Race Committee that we have changed destinations. No we are not going to Australia, we are going to Asia. Soon however Australia will be the closest continent as it is yet another day and a half before we turn north towards India. By tonight conditions should improve a bit, with the 35-40knot winds over and done with. So far no breakages, so we are in a good shape.

Even though our easterly route means an extra 900 nm of sailing, none of us is complaining. The alternative scenario is namely a beat all the way from Cape Town to Mauritius. This is by far the most likely scenario, so has our good behaviour in Cape Town made the Gods of the Sea look on us favorably? Who knows, but in any case, we have a big high blocking our way north at the moment, and two low pressure systems will help to get round it to the east. The added bonus of being far east is that we will have a great wind angle in the trade winds later (and we might be able to crack that champagne?)

Back to my bunk for another bumpy ride. We have a tight luff sail up, so less chance of broaching, pitch poling or other nasty stuff. Phew!

Sleep well my love, we are fast, but safe!

Wouter Verbraak - navigator

Pictures alle from Volvo Ocean Racing

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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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