1:20 AM Sat 21 Mar 2009 GMT
Latest news from Ericsson 3 and Telefonica Blue, sailing leg 5 of the Volvo Ocean Race.
ERICSSON 3 LEG FIVE DAY 35 QFB: received 20.03.09 1445 GMT
If someone thought the tough days were over, they were wrong. Yesterday evening and the entire night has been a fight. Boat-breaking conditions, for sure.
Hard reaching with a really nasty sea state and a never ending slamming and bashing. I was bumping around in my bunk and one time I slid out of it and woke up to a d?j? vu experience. We were taking on water.
We have a fitting on deck which has been leaking since the start. We never had time to fix it properly before we left Taiwan. It is nothing serious; we just have to bail out a couple of buckets a couple of times from the bow every day. But tonight we suddenly had a couple of hundred litres in there. D?j? vu...
The fitting had come off and the water was pouring in. But Jens Dolmer and Anders Dahlsj? managed to fix it. We got the water out and everything was back to normal again.
Everyone is pretty used to this kind of weather now. It is not very nice and whatever you do, it takes a lot of energy. We are all a bit afraid that the boat is going to break, that would really feel bad, not the least now when we are in the lead. When we started to leak on leg four, we were in a pretty solid second place and it was not a nice feeling to being forced to miss out on those points. If we again would lose a nice position due to the boat breaking I would have a personal breakdown I think.
I now know how much it takes to fix the boat and come back as a crew and perform on the sea again after an incident like we had. I am very proud to be a part of this crew having achieved what we have since Taiwan.
Back to the rough last night:
Since the breakdown, everyone is a bit worried when we hit bad conditions with a lot of slamming. But we all put a lot of trust in Jens, our boat captain, and if he is happy, we are usually happy. Yesterday he stayed up during the night looking after the boat. He spent most of his time in the nav desk checking the numbers, being the performance police, while Aksel Magdahl was sleeping. But, at the same time, he is listening and instantly reacting to noises he has not heard before and making the call when the guys should take the foot off the pedal.
'If I think we are pushing to hard I let the keel down a couple of degrees to make the boat go slower'.
There are a lot of noisy bangs and slams going on, but you get familiar with the sound and you can filter out if something is not as it should be. Jens looked calm almost all the time during the night and that means everyone else was calm as well.
We have made big gains the last 24 hours, but it is far from a straight highway to the finish. There are still many things that can go wrong and the next thing to worry about is a high pressure that we will soon reach. And now it looks like it will be very light when we get closer to Rio, which also gives the others an opportunity to catch up...
This morning we had a nice visit that made us think of something else for a second. The Norwegian squad with Eivind Melleby and Arve Roaas were happy with seeing a new face onboard. It was a very small swordfish and it did Arve a big favour by doing some cleaning between his teeth.
Gustav Morin - MCM
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TELEF?NICA BLUE LEG FIVE DAY 35 QFB: received 20.03.09 1026 GMT
Finally yesterday late afternoon we got moving again in the right direction, as it took a long time before the breeze started filling in. It is amazing so much influence a landmass has on the wind. Sixty miles further south of us it was blowing a full gale, a tough one to answer when asked what I would have preferred.
We ended up going east of Staten Island, as we otherwise wouldn't have made good progress with our J4 jib. Now we are going west of the Falkland Islands as we don't want to get trapped by the building high pressure in front of us.
These highs are moving from west to east, and since we can't make it in front of it, this is the only choice we have. This means as well sailing very tight angles and later during the day we will be going upwind again. But tonight is just beautiful, a clear night, not a single cloud to spot: still a bit nippy, but who cares? We are going north.
We had though, a slow down period, after a so-called checkstay had stripped completely off the mast. This is a stay which roughly attaches in the middle of the mast, and with that we can control the bend of the mast. We were fully aware that this could happen, as we had damaged it when we broke the forestay. It was a good thing that we had set up a temporary stay already from day one, just in case this would happen.
David (David Vera) had to go up in the rig, remember night time and waves of around 2-3 meters high, to take the checkstay down and of course to check if there was any further damage. It all looks good, but we are going to do another one as soon the sun comes up. We are taking these kinds of setbacks with a 'smile' on our face, nothing what we can't face and we will tackle it and move on.
Gabry (Gabriel Olivo - MCM) had a full-on day, from 0230 yesterday until late this evening, not only taking all the footage when we rounded the Horn, but making sure as well to get all the videos and pictures off the boat. He has been sitting for hours behind his laptop editing every single item to make sure it was perfect before sending it off. He got his well deserved bonus, even that he will only realize tomorrow morning. We didn't wake him up for covering the mast ascent. The boy needed some well deserved sleep!!
Bouwe Bekking - skipper
www.volvooceanrace.org
by Ericsson 3 and Telefonica Blue
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