Sport-heute: Sailing - ERICSSON 4 LEG TWO DAY 11: received 25.11.08 0147 GMT

25. November 2008, 16:22

ERICSSON 4 LEG TWO DAY 11: received 25.11.08 0147 GMT

BUNCHING UP

It's been a pretty wet 24 hours aboard the good ship E4!
We have been sailing along making a very high average boat speed. Not quite record pace, but very close.

We have a wind angle of roughly 100 degrees. Anything in that sort of region means some serious fire hosing on deck!

CAPE TOWN - CHOCIN INDIA (mk) For Ryan Godfrey and I, this is where we get a sort of revenge on the rest of the crew. We spend our lives completely underwater up on
the foredeck while the other boys take great delight in laughing at us. At this angle, they get a taste of it, but still no way near as bad as the front end. It humours us to hear them complaining about the water.

We got our first sighting of Ericsson 3, 4 hours ago. She is roughly 8 miles dead astern of us and sailing a very good race.

I imagine we'll be tied together for a while now. It is quite good to have another boat in sight as it pushes you to race a bit harder.

We've had a few crimes onboard recently..... The latest one was in the toilet. I won't go into detail, but I can assure you, it wasn't pretty.

Another crime was the loss of the serving spoon which Dave Endean decided to throw overboard with the leftover food. We are now stirring our meals with a winch handle! In Dave's defence, He was handed the pot in pitch blackness and asked to ditch the food overboard. So there is another culprit involved.

Everything else seems to be rumbling along okay. We've had our fair share of breakdowns, downtime and bad luck in this leg. We're just doing our best to minimise all that nasty stuff and keep the bow pointing toward India.

The crew are doing well with only minor injuries, which is a good thing. Tony (Mutter) is enjoying being back on the yacht. He's being extra careful not to hurt himself. I guess he just doesn't want me near him with the medical kit again!

Phil 'Blood' Jameson - Bowman

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TELEFÓNICA BLUE LEG TWO DAY 11 QFB: received 25.11.08 0612 GMT

Late yesterday afternoon there must have been some 'panic' in the race headquarters, as we got following message from them, I quote RHQ: 'MRCC Madrid have just rung us to say one of your EPRIBS has been set off. Can you confirm all is ok onboard and if you are aware that an EPIRB has been activated. We tried to ring but cannot get through?'

An EPIRB is an emergency beacon, which you can activate when you are in distress. Once activated it send a distress signal to a satellite, which then gets picked up by a land station. Luckily nothing of that, as we were all smiles and blasting along and actually started making again some gains. The wind had freed up, and the missing daggerboard was not so critical. Of course we responded quickly back that all was ok and we checked the EPIRB which is mounted at the stern of our boat, and indeed she was switched on. It has a hydrostatic release, so in case a boat sinks, it switches itself on. As we were more under water than over the water by sailing so fast, the machine thought we were going under, so it switched on. Actually good to know that this system works flawless and big brother is watching us.

Then last night we got 'dogged' by a bad cloud, we had to go upwind for three hours in very light winds, and not having the daggerboard made it even more painful. In the mean time the other boats reached along. Sifi (Simon Fisher) and myself were sitting in the navstation, looking in disbelieve at the numbers: WHAT TO DO? Tack and try to find the same wind as the others or ride it out. Sifi in favour of tacking and me going straight. Tacking we would have not only lost miles to the finish, but more importantly we would have been sailing directly behind the leaders. We had another look at all the weather maps, yes, the east would be little better long term, but without the daggerboard we can only sail about 7-8 degrees lower than the others, so there is no way to match them. Therefore we decided to carry on, and hope we find a bit
of luck while crossing the doldrums.

Cheers,

Bouwe Bekking - Skipper

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PUMA LEG TWO DAY 11 QFB: received 25.11.08 0955 GMT

Something very strange happened this morning. Hard to believe but somehow my watch reset it self whilst I slept, and put me an hour late getting into the galley to sort out breakfast. This could have been a big problem at any other meal time than breakfast or with any off coming watch than Salty (Rob Salthouse) and Michi (Müller).

Fortunately for me breakfast today is cold muesli, just add your own water. So when I got to the galley, I thought it was 0105hrs an hour early but was in fact it was 0205hrs and Salty had already dove into the day 11 food bag and had the muesli mix already halfway down his neck.

Why are we having breakfast at 0200hrs you are probably asking yourself, well the vessel operates on GMT ( Greenwich Mean Time) this is the time in Greenwich England on the 0 degree longitude meridian but the sun here at 73 degrees East comes up at around 0300hrs GMT. It takes some getting used to. So as I arrived at the galley making my excuses and apologies Salty and Michi just looked at each other grinned and told me not to worry about it. OK so I wont, phew.

The hard reaching/fetching conditions of the last few days have finally started easing up, that's a good thing and I don't mind admitting that last night I had just about had enough. One major reason for my frustration last night was that I was starting to have some equipment malfunctions, as there was so much humidity in the boat that my camera decided that it was finished for the day. Main problem with this is that I had a very important tape inside that camera and at that point didn't know if I would be able to ever get it out. I put the camera in the engine bay overnight and fortunately this morning it fired up first time and I was able to retrieve the tape. OK, with the lighter winds will get us to Cochin a little slower but trust me as long as the other boats go a bit lighter than us I'll happily do lunch instead of breakfast at this point.

Rick Deppe - MCM

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BUNCHING UP

It is crunch time for the fleet as they head towards the Doldrums and ponder the best way through the shifting light patches. The boats are still reaching north but the speeds are dropping and they are compressing as they approach the final 1,000 nautical miles of leg two.

Bouwe Bekking/NED on Telefónica Blue was contemplating the upcoming route last night with navigator Simon Fisher/GBR with differing opinions. The decision to tack was the subject of discussion, with Fisher for and Bekking against. Bekking won the day and it seems to have paid off as the blue boat has gained 22 miles in the last 24 hours on the leader Ericsson 4 (Torben Grael/BRA).

Fisher explained, 'To say the last 18 hours of my life have been stressful would be a bit of an understatement! Sailing or rather limping along with our busted wing (daggerboard) we found ourselves last night in all kinds of bother, with a massive header that we couldn't escape by sailing high, which had me biting me nails, pulling my hair out and staring at the computer screen in disbelief as the guys around us wound out massive amounts of easting.

'As Bouwe mentioned at one stage I was even looking at the option of tacking which probably in retrospect was a pretty ballsy option so it was good to have him there to try and counter the reasoning for doing one thing or another.

'Several hours on I am feeling slightly better about our position, at one stage it looked like we were headed to the bottom of the fleet by virtue of our westerly position but with some updated weather and now a little more breeze than expected the situation is looking slightly brighter.'

The rest of the fleet have made gains over the past day on the leader, bar Ericsson 3 (Anders Lewander/SWE) who lost 2 miles to their sistership, but are still within striking distance, only 7 miles to the south. Word from the Nordic boat is that they are feeling the pressure as the end nears. 'It is just as exciting as it is hard to cope with the stress that the competition creates. Some people have a hard time watching a game of soccer when the score is equal and there are just a few minutes to go. We are experiencing the exact same feeling. But we have been feeling it since the scoring-gate and we will probably have to cope with it until we reach the finish line in about four days.'

PUMA (Ken Read/USA) has held onto third over the past 24 hours with Green Dragon (Ian Walker/GBR) and Telefónica Blue jostling for fourth position gaining and losing to each other. At the 1300 GMT position report Telefónica Blue had inched in front of the Dragon in the tables with the Spanish boat five miles closer to Cochin but 64 miles separating them east to west.

Telefónica Black (Fernando EchÃ¡varri/ESP) is still the furthest west and lost sixth to Delta Lloyd (Roberto Bermudez/ESP), who has gained a massive 103 miles over the past 24 hours on the leader and jumped up from last place. Team Russia (Andreas Hanakamp/AUS) have also gained on Ericsson 4, by 72 miles and have had a run of 419 miles in 24 hours.

As the boats slow and pick their way through the Doldrums the predicted time of arrival is moving back with the current ETA being early morning on Sunday 30th November.

Leg Two Day 11: 1300 GMT Volvo Ocean Race Positions
(boat name/country/skipper/nationality/distance to finish)

Ericsson 4 SWE (Torben Grael/BRA) DTF 1228 nm
Ericsson 3 SWE (Anders Lewander/SWE) + 7
PUMA Racing Team USA (Ken Read/USA) + 11
Telefónica Blue ESP (Bouwe Bekking/NED) +22
Green Dragon IRL/CHN (Ian Walker/GBR) + 27
Delta Lloyd IRL (Roberto Bermudez/ESP) + 95
Telefónica Black ESP (Fernando EchÃ¡varri/ESP) +98
Team Russia RUS (Andreas Hanakamp/AUT) +142

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Leserkommentare (0) »

Gustav Morin/Ericsson 3/Volvo Ocean Race 200811120. Early morning. Changing to A3 and starting tp head a bit north. We dont think we can beat Ericsson 3 to the scoring-gate but hopefully we will be ahead of the Green Dragoons.

Gabriele Olivo/Telefonica Blue/Volvo Ocean Race Telefonica Blue make repairs to their mainsail on leg 2 of the Volvo Ocean Race from Cape Town, South Africa to Cochin, India

ERICSSON 4 LEG TWO DAY 11: received 25.11.08 0147 GMT

BUNCHING UPIt's been a pretty wet 24 hours aboard the good ship E4! We have been sailing along making a very high average boat speed. Not quite record pace, but very close. We have a wind angle of roughly 100 degrees. Anything in that sort of region means some serious fire hosing on deck!

BUNCHING UP

It's been a pretty wet 24 hours aboard the good ship E4!
We have been sailing along making a very high average boat speed. Not quite record pace, but very close.

We have a wind angle of roughly 100 degrees. Anything in that sort of region means some serious fire hosing on deck!