Throughout yesterday afternoon (05/03), the speeds and the wind built for the Portimão Global Ocean Race fleet. At midday, Felipe Cubillos and José Muñoz on Desafio Cabo de Hornos increased their lead over Boris Herrmann and Felix Oehme on Beluga Racer to 11 miles, while Jeremy Salvesen and David Thomson kept south on Team Mowgli, bouncing off the 45°S southern limit before climbing north. By mid-afternoon, Salvesen and Thomson were the fastest Class 40, averaging nine knots as the breeze faltered. Holding the northern station, solo sailor, Michel Kleinjans, was busy showing why he has held the Marseille-Carthage single-handed, monohull record since March last year as he continued to push Roaring Forty eastwards, just fractionally slower than Team Mowgli, trailing the double-handed race leader by six miles.
At around midnight last night, the fleet dropped south-east in formation, averaging between 10-11 knots and converged at the southern limit boundary before ricocheting north-east again. Three hours later, the German team on Beluga Racer made their move and took the lead for the first time in two weeks. In the latest 0620 GMT (06/03) position poll, Herrmann and Oehme continue to lead the fleet with the fastest average speed of 11 knots, just ten miles north of the exclusion zone, with the British duo in second place on Team Mowgli and the Chilean team in third on Desafio Cabo to Hornos 14 miles behind the German boat, separated by less than one mile. Keeping north of the double-handed pack, solo sailor, Michel Kleinjans, has dropped back and Roaring Forty now trails the fleet leader by 33 miles.
With the Pacific Ocean scoring gate at 130°W, approximately 300 miles and just over one day of sailing to the east of the fleet at current speeds, the German team are looking for a hat trick, adding the maximum Leg 3 gate points to their existing tally of four points for crossing the Atlantic and Indian Ocean scoring gates first during Leg 1 and Leg 2. On Wednesday, Boris Herrmann’s strategy was characteristically clear: “Pretty soon, the Roaring Forties are going to start living up to their name,” he predicted. “Our goal is to get to the front of the fleet by then and collect the points at the scoring gate.” Currently holding a 14 mile lead over the British and Chilean Class 40s, Herrmann and Oehme’s distance advantage relies upon the strong westerly to south-westerly breeze forecast to arrive later today, building from 20-30 knots and possibly higher. The Portimão Global Ocean Race fleet should clip the northern limit of this wide band of frigid wind spinning off Antarctica and the first boat to feel the effect of the icy blast will profit dramatically.
Meanwhile, on Team Mowgli, the intensity of the close racing, the weather conditions and the tactics have become similar to an inshore race: “In the zig-zag world of gybing between the ice gate to the south and high pressure systems to the north, we were unlucky last night when the new wind came in to be caught on a northerly ‘zag’ whilst the rest of the fleet, already to our north, were ‘zigging’ away eastwards,” explained Salvesen this morning. “This cost us not only our brief spot at the top of the leaderboard, but 12 miles which we are still trying to make up.”
As the light begins to fade in the Pacific Ocean, Team Mowgli are currently averaging 10 knots, one knot slower than Beluga Racer. “The winds have been good to us today,” confirms the British skipper. “Around 15 knots, rising to 24 knots and boat speed topping out at nearly 17 knots,” he reports. “The swell has been moderate and the sailing has been swell!” However, running repairs have been undertaken by Salvesen and Thomson: “We had a major failure with our autopilot computer systems last night which took a long time to resolve,” confirms Salvesen. “David was helming in the dark without any instrumentation and I was busy running new wires around down below and trying to get to the bottom of the problem. There are five independent display units, each one of them a computer in its own right and we had to isolate them all and then try to work out where the problem lay.”
Satellite phone calls to the system’s manufacturer in France and a stream of emails soon resolved the problem. “Between us all, we eventually managed to get the systems up and running again. It seems that one of the display units, perhaps together with one of the wind instruments, had developed a fault and once they were all replaced and re-programmed, we could get going again.” The British duo has also discovered minor sail damage: “At the same time, the metal ring on the tack of the mainsail broke and we needed to get that lashed down too,” adds Salvesen. “Not a major problem and we will leave proper repairs until Brazil.”
Having held pole position in the double-handed fleet almost continuously for the past week, Felipe Cubillos and José Muñoz on Desafio Cabo de Hornos are preparing for the heavy breeze. “In the light breeze, we didn’t use the autopilot at all,” reports Cubillos. “We were handsteering all the time to get every knot of speed out of the boat and now, we are a little tired,” he admits. However, the Chilean duo must recover rapidly. “In the next 24 hours we will definitely begin to receive strong winds, possibly up to 50 knots,” the Chilean skipper predicted late yesterday. “Our aim is to arrive at these winds at the front of the fleet. Now, the level of stress changes because the race becomes a battle of survival for the crews and boats. We must now concentrate on not breaking anything – especially the sails – and also resist the urge to sail at night with too much canvas when we can’t spot squall clouds ahead.”