Leg One updates

[floatsome 0]

Hall Spar on Puma and Future Fibres on the other I think. Talking about a fitting failure on latest. Glad I am not on Puma, its a long way to anywhere. Mutter man must be wondering who up there doesnt like him.

[Absolution 7]

No, diffferent spar makers.

 

Southern Spars must still have their fingers crossed WT

[Guest]

Old news, new video about Pumas mast.

 

[Guest]

Puma's mast had Southern Spars rigging on it

[Guest]

the midnight pr

 

Yesterday, within the space of an hour, two very serious events had provided a stark reminder of just how dangerous and on the edge this race can be.

 

 

PUMA’s Mar Mostro (Ken Read/USA) became the second boat to dismast on leg one of the Volvo Ocean Race. The first was Ian Walker and Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing’s Azzam on the first night. PUMA’s Mar Mostro has since retired from this leg and will score zero points. Read and his team are considering all options in order to get the boat to Cape Town as quickly as possible.

 

 

“To say that we are disappointed would be the understatement of the day,” he said shortly after the rig went over the side. The boat was reaching in about 23 knots of wind, with one reef in the mainsail and a jib and staysail set. “This is by no means the end of the [PUMA] programme, but realistically it is quite a setback,” Read added.

 

 

Meanwhile, CAMPER (Chris Nicholson/AUS) now in second place, also had a stern reality check of what exactly they are doing and how on the edge it is.

 

 

Shortly before PUMA’s dismasting yesterday, bowman Mike Pammenter (RSA) was injured when, during a sail change, he was swept off his feet by a wall of water and collided with the shrouds, with the full impact being felt by his mouth.

 

 

Trailing blood, Pammenter staggered below where he was attended to by race veterans and medics Tony Rae and Stu Bannatyne.

 

 

Pammenter’s front tooth was completely smashed out and he cut his lip. Fortunately, he was wearing a helmet, saving him from worse injury.

 

 

“The comforting thing for sure was seeing Tony go about his role as the medic on board,” said CAMPER’s MCM Hamish Hooper. “Not too many people could suture up an open lip and inject a tooth nerve with anaesthetic on a Volvo Open 70 in the middle of a South Atlantic low-pressure system. True heroics.”

 

 

In spite of this drama, CAMPER only conceded two miles to race leader Telefónica (Iker Martínez/ESP) who remain focused on being the first boat to cross the line in Cape Town and are 94 nautical miles ahead of CAMPER. Telefónica is still heading south in order to skirt the Saint Helena High, which due to its position further south this year than ever before, means sailing more miles than anticipated in order to reach the westerly breeze on the southern side, and the fast escalator to Cape Town.

 

 

Now in third position, 274 nm behind the blue boat, Groupama 4 (Franck Cammas/FRA) has spent the last two days on a fast port tack reach. Australian trimmer/helmsman Phil Harmer reports good reaching conditions, with boat speed varying between 17 and 24 knots. “The guys are doing a great job of sailing the boat fast,” he said. “Our boat really enjoys these conditions. It’s a lot of fun sailing, but it also very wet, but that is part of the game. We have another day or so of this and then finally we will get the spinnaker up again hopefully and we get closer and closer to Cape Town every day. Everything is happy on Groupama 4.”

[jetsom 0]

Think I read recently a blog from one of the crew from a VOR entrant pre-start describe the old Whitbread race as for gentleman sailors racing cruising yachts compared to the current 'hard' professionals now sailing extreme race yacts. I suspect guys like Simon Gundry, Geoff Stagg and many others would take exception to being described as gentleman sailors and their boats as cruisers. Interesting to reflect that now that half current fleet is out of Leg 1 and two couldn't even get out of the Med before they had to retire, that after Burton, Cutter, Heaths Condor and Ceramco, Blakie came to the realisation that "to finish first, first you must finish".

 

Now that professionalism has effectively wiped out sailing as an international amateur sport they seem intent on killing it altogether all to line the pockets with sponsors $ of a few professional crew and their well paid management teams. Don't think I'd like to be the VOR organisers trying to placte their sponsors now that half the fleet has retired.

 

I think I also read that the AC45 fleet could only get live television coverage of the San Diego event just held onto an obscure NoCal cable channel and the local SoCal affliates of the major US networks never even bothered to mention the San Diego event in their sports news summaries let alone play footage supplied to them. So much for the stadium sport designed for televison and the crash and burn market they have targeted.

[Guest Rocket]

You are so right Jetsom

 

Had a round of golf with one of the originals a year or two back. He reminded me that when they wee down in the southern ocean with the rigs frozen solid they were wearing jerseys and PVC.... Gentlemen sailors indeed - hard core I reckon!

[Marshy 30]

Latest email from Puma - Thats one hell of a recovery plan!

 

 

 

Leg 1, Day 18

22 November 2011

Ken Read, Skipper, PUMA Ocean Racing

 

It has taken me a long time to come to this conclusion: There is nothing you should be surprised about in ocean racing. Yesterday was no exception.

 

The day started off simply enough. Breeze filling from the northeast, and it was a great ride due south with 20-25 knots of wind and average speeds in the low 20s. Making tracks. Looking at the routing software and seeing only five days and some change left in the leg. Looking at Telefónica and trying to assess where and how we could get by them.

 

We were racing. Racing is great.

 

Then, in one brief moment, we started surviving.

 

I was on deck for a couple hours trimming the main for Kelvin and the new watch came on deck. Jono took the main, and Tony grabbed the wheel. The boat was ripping, we liked our spot and all was good. All morning it was reef, un-reef, reef again.

 

About 10 minutes after I got below, the watch on deck asked for a hand to reef again. Tom Addis had his foul weather gear on and said he would go up and help. Then, 3 minutes after the reef was in and we were off again, our world came crashing down around us.

 

The very last thing I thought of that day was we have to be careful of our mast. This boat and everything on it was built to push and we were pushing. Nothing out of hand, but we were certainly pushing.

 

We are trying to assess what happened to the mast and chances are it will be some little fitting that simply gave it up at the wrong time. It usually is. I hope for our sake it is as simple as that because our spare mast is identical and we have to find the weak link so we can be sure this doesn’t happen again.

 

Wake up racing, go to sleep 2,500 miles from where you need to be with a 15 foot stump for a mast and a storm jib and storm trysail lashed to it going 2.8 knots. Wondering when food will run out and how to use the limited amount of diesel fuel that is on board.

 

This is when you need friends and people that care for you.

 

In the modern days of communication I can call anyone in the world from the phone on the boat just as if I was in my car driving down Memorial Blvd in Newport, Rhode Island…just a tad more expensive.

 

Calls to VOR headquarters sprung them into action. Calls to our sponsors and Kimo and the phenomenal shore team and they spring into action. Dozens of ideas being thrown around. Trying to think clearly because we are in the middle of freakin nowhere and I have 10 people who not only want to continue with this race and see this thing through, but they also want to eat at some point and have water to drink and be real human beings…and not drift toward South Africa with no hope of being there in the near future.

 

So this is where we are.

 

At approximately 18:00 GMT this evening, the ship Zim Monaco should arrive to our position to deliver 450 litres of diesel fuel. At the end of the day, we determined diesel is our lifeblood out here. With it, we can make water and make ground towards a given destination with our 15-foot stump. And that destination is…drum roll…the beautiful island of Tristan da Cuhna!

 

That’s right, Tristan Island. My daughter, Tory, sent me a fantastic e-mail telling me that Tristan has a population of 275 people and is literally a volcano sticking out of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean 6.5 miles wide. It is the closest point of land, which we can re-supply and rally around the next part of our plan. No airport, no other way to get to the Island except by boat.

 

From Tristan, we plan to have a ship meet us coming from Cape Town with its own crane that can center pick the boat up and place it on the ship on our cradle that our shore crew will have in place upon arrival.

 

Oh, and the harbor is too shallow to get into in Tristan. We will have to do this in the ocean.

 

On the ship will be our shore team with a 20-foot container full of tools and equipment and all of us, and we will spend the next four-plus days of transport to Cape Town putting the pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together again.

 

The spare mast is being flown in from the U.S. as we speak and will meet us in Cape Town. We will need to get the boat in the water as soon as we get to Cape Town to tune the rig properly in time to do the In-Port race and next leg to Abu Dhabi.

 

What could go wrong?

 

Well, without the people in the Volvo Ocean Race office and our internal folks and the Rio Maritime Rescue Authority and the radio operator in Tristan and Antonio Bertone [PUMA CEO] and Håkan Svensson [bERG CEO] and Captain Borys from the Zim Monaco, etc, etc, there is no way that any of the above crazy scenario would even be remotely possible.

 

Will it go exactly as planned? For sure no way.

 

Will it happen? Hell, why not.

 

So, between Amory and myself, we will report on progress. And, Amo will certainly have his camera tuned to this crazy action. Stay tuned and don’t be surprised if the big cat is back on the line in Cape Town. That is what is keeping the crew on this boat sane right now. Hope.

 

And, the realization that you never know what tomorrow may bring.

 

-- Kenny

[markm 30]

Not completely right in my view, thought Blake discovered with Lion which was the result of the 'lessons' mentioned above that if you build a boat to finish, don't be completely surprised if you're not in fact first after all.

 

Think there was a subsequent lesson that went something along the lines of turn up better prepared, faster and maybe even bigger than everyone else, doesn't mean you'll win but it does improve the odds.

[Guest Rocket]

Yep Lion is the epitome of "over built" - still...

[Guest]

Yep Lion is the epitome of "over built" - still...

 

Yes, but in the Lion New Zealand Book Peter Blake states that he was unhappy with the build of Lion, and that He did not get what he asked for, with the design being compromised in a number of places, and over built as a result.

 

On another topic, I don't think the stop overs are long enough.

 

If a boat loses it's rig two-thirds of the way into leg one and cannot sail to the finish under jury rig and have any chance of being ready for the restart, that says to me that pretty much any rig failure puts you out - there simply is not allowance for a jury rigged boat to complete a leg. I guess the decision to have 9 legs means there is pressure to make the stop overs shorter, or the event drags on and on too much. I am not sure that's a good or a bad thing. But if you design the race route and leg lengths and stop over lengths to pretty much rule out boats finishing leg if they have significant gear issues you are buying into an interesting trade off... Do you build to ensure you finish, and hand a performance edge to those who are willing to flirt with the margins in their design... or do you push for the extreme of performance at the possible expense of reliability...

 

I would think that if the stopovers are so short so as to preclude jury rigged boats finishing, then the points ought to be weighted to significantly favour boats who finish (say instead of 30, 25, 20, 15, 10 , 5 with 0 for DNF, make it 50, 45, 40, 35, 30, 25, 0 for DNF, or that plus 5 points for having made it to the leg midpoint waypoint or something). If you don't then you are more likely to see damaged boats withdrawing from legs to have enough time to commence the next one. If you have a fleet of 15 boats that might not be such an issue, bit with a fleet of just 6 to start with, it is.

[Guest]

video from camper

 

http://www.youtube.com/user/Camper#p/u/6/kqUm-FEDHMA

 

from volvo

 

[Guest]

telefonica have been doing a good job of keeping camper around the 100nm in the last 12 hours. Its going to be crunch time for camper shortly and then we will see who gets the rum...cough cough (clipper)

[jetsom 0]

Not completely right in my view, thought Blake discovered with Lion which was the result of the 'lessons' mentioned above that if you build a boat to finish, don't be completely surprised if you're not in fact first after all.

 

Think there was a subsequent lesson that went something along the lines of turn up better prepared, faster and maybe even bigger than everyone else, doesn't mean you'll win but it does improve the odds.

 

Agree with you entirely but without delving too much into the merits of Lion (Tom Clarke called the shots on that one... Blakie originally wanted another Farr boat just bigger- he eventually got it in Steinlager) my point was when the race was decided on total elapsed time you had to finish every leg. Now the VOR is a points based race where inshore races count (for the camera/sponsors), ridiculous deviations into the Persian Gulf and China (for the sponsors), having to ship the yachts across the top half of the Indian Ocean etc etc. Hardly an 'around the world race" and all done for sponsors benefit with the ultimate objective being so that the marketers, managers and professional crews can get paid. F1 this is not.

 

Remember the outrage from these same guys when the last AC was on.... only two boats with relatively small crew numbers and 1000 professional crew unemployed. Where's my feed bag - pig trough?

 

Bottomline in my view is that the increasing professionalism of the sport over the last 20 years has done nothing to extend its reach to the public as a spectacle or built interest to attract newcomers (other than those who want on the professional gravy train), or even added to the fleets local racing. In the process they've trashed the amatuer sport. Do we really expect the Ellison/Coutts version of AC to change anything?

 

That's my rant over

[Guest]

PR time again. In other Volvo news its still the same. Small gains wither being made by telefonica or Camper, while groupama have done the most nm in 24 hours now.

 

 

While Telefónica (Iker Martínez/ESP) leads the dash to Cape Town, PUMA’s Mar Mostro (Ken Read/USA) made a successful rendezvous with a cargo ship and transferred enough fuel to allow the crew to motor towards the remote island of Tristan da Cunha.

 

As the ship approached, Ken Read said, “This is our new best friend. This is life as we know it". The green jerry cans of fuel were transferred using ropes as the crew of Mar Mostro held the boat steady about two boat lengths from the towering side of the ship.

 

The sea state was calm and the operation was completed in daylight without a hitch, although Read said it was the most nerve-wracking thing he had ever done. The crew sent a package of t-shirts to the cargo ship by way of thanks, then re-hoisted their jury rig and set off in the direction of the island.

 

Telefónica has 1,614 nautical miles (nm) to run to the finish and computers are predicting her arrival in Cape Town on November 27. Yesterday, as the team neared the centre of the Saint Helena High, the day was quiet and cold and began with a beautiful sunrise. The highlight for the team was the first sighting of the majestic Albatross, the ocean wanderer whose solitary presence is a reminder of what it yet to come for the teams when they enter the vast wastes of the Southern Ocean.

 

CAMPER (Chris Nicholson/AUS) lies 107 nm astern. Crewman Tony Rae, who earlier in the week performed surgery on bowman Mike Pammenter’s face when he collided with the shrouds in heavy weather, confirms that his patient is making good progress. Rae, one of two medics on board, spent many hours training on ambulances and hospitals in preparation for this race.

 

“I never like to see anyone get injured and we don’t want that to happen to any of the crew as if any of them are down for any length of time, it’s not good for the boat. I’ve trained for those sorts of situations, so that when you come across those sorts of injuries or situations you can deal with it calmly and think through it. Time will tell if I have done a decent job or not,” he said.

 

A further 317 nm back, but sure of a podium position provided nothing unexpected happens, is Groupama 4 (Franck Cammas/FRA). The team is not so optimistic on reaching the cold front in time to sweep them quickly towards the finish. “Even the optimistic ones [forecasts] are not so optimistic anymore,” MCM Yann Riou reports. The team continues on port tack as temperatures fall, pushing the boat as hard as they dare.

[Guest]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm3pC7ksxY4

 

I would have put music to it, but I didnt have decent enough music to fit the scenario a little bit of footage from yesterdays dismarsting.

[Guest]

well im glad that there have been 2 views already as youtube reckon there going to block it world wide as it breaks copy right. Think they have it wrong this time as crew.org covers the online promotion side of things. If anyone cant see the video please let me know.

[Guest]

here comes the 'I couldn't sleep at all' all nighter, and the lastest from camper

 

http://www.youtube.com/user/Camper#p/u/6/NpEUzd-EzKo

[Guest]

another PR

 

The Volvo Ocean Race fleet are set for some high adrenaline action over the next two days with the three remaining boats hoping to ride a fast moving South Atlantic cold front all the way to the first leg finish in Cape Town.

 

On board leader Team Telefónica, skippered by Spain’s Iker Martínez, the crew have battened down the hatches ahead of the storm system, the first effects of which have already pushed their peak boat speed up to almost 30 knots.

 

Despite travelling at breakneck speed navigator Andrew Cape says the crew and the boat are under completely under control and ready to go even faster.

 

“We’re at the beginning of a front so we’re getting ready for the big speeds. We are already seeing 25 – 30 knots of breeze and the next day or so is going to be quite exciting for us.

 

“We’re already averaging 24 knots so it’s already getting a bit spooky. We’re preparing ourselves for a lot more than that -- and a full 36 hours of it.

 

“It’ll be a good ride.”

 

Historically the final section of this leg is where 24-hour distance records are set. Mike Sanderson on ABN AMRO 1 (563 nm) and Torben Grael on Ericsson 4 (696.8 nm) respectively turned in record setting performances here in the last two races. Sanderson’s chances of another record attempt in this race ended when bow damage to Team Sanya sidelined him for the first leg.

 

According to race meteorologist Gonzalo Infante, however, the speed that the cold front is travelling at means that the window for a record attempt this time is very small.

 

“The front itself is moving at around 40 knots so the boats will not be able to ride it all the way to Cape Town. To break the record they will have to average faster than 24.85 nautical miles over a 24 hour period and the record attempt weather window could shut as early 1200 UTC tomorrow.”

 

Infante believes the timing of the cold front will benefit Telefónica the most, with Chris Nicholson’s second placed CAMPER arriving a little too late for the full effect.

 

Third placed Franck Cammas’ Groupama sailing team could have to dig much deeper south to avoid being caught by a secondary windless high pressure system which could keep them at sea for days.

 

With a 130 nautical mile distance to finish lead over CAMPER with Emirates Team New Zealand, Cape says Telefónica will have to strike a balance between speed and caution on the run in to Cape Town.

 

“Clearly we don’t want to break anything but we do still have to push the boat to get in on time. If we delay it just gets worse and worse. We’ve definitely got the racing sails up and going full speed.”

 

Cape says he is very happy with Telefónica’s positioning in relation to the chasing CAMPER, but also strikes a note of caution.

 

“We’re 50 miles due south which is very important. We get a better angle on the breeze and we ride the front for longer. They will get the lighter airs earlier so we will still need to keep an eye on them and make sure we don’t leave ourselves exposed.”

 

As for record attempts, Cape agrees that breaking the monohull world record is unlikely, but believes the IWC Schaffhausen speed distance challenge prize for the fastest 24 hour run on Leg 1 could be set.

 

“We’ve got at least 30 hours of sailing in good strong breeze and we’ve seen 29 knots of boat speed in the last couple of hours but the potential speed is easily in excess of 30 knots. We could average 26 knots if we choose to do so.

 

“I think everyone is pretty happy with where they are right now so the most important thing is not to break anything.”

 

Cape also confessed that after nearly three weeks of non-stop ocean racing the Telefónica crew were ready to get ashore.

 

“Everyone just wants to get in now. We’ve had enough. We’ve been out here 18 days, got three more days to go and they are going to be wet, scary days.

 

“I think everyone’s anxious to get in, have a beer, see their families.”

 

Latest routing predictions suggest that Team Telefónica could finish the first leg in Cape Town on the evening of Sunday November 27.

 

Having retired from the leg, Ken Read's dismasted PUMA Ocean Racing powered by BERG completed a tricky transfer of fuel from a container ship last night to allow them to continue to motor sail with a jury rig to the island of Tristan de Cunha to rendezvous with their shore crew.

[Guest]

Not much to report from while you have all been sleeping. Telefonica have continued to pull ahead by around 2-3nm per report as they are getting the pressure from the storm first. Tonight and tomorrow should be good days for racing. Anyone wanna put on bets to see if Telefonica break something allowing Camper the 'easy' win?.