Telefónica Blue continues to make her mark on the Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09 when at 0311 GMT today, she was first past the scoring gate off Newfoundland, claiming four points. This comes on top of her recent wins inshore in Rio de Janeiro and Boston and her rounding the Fernando de Noronha Gate in first place on leg six.
The crew of the blue boat had to work hard for their points and at first, according to skipper Bouwe Bekking, it wasn’t looking good at all.
“For some reason, we had been losing ground and were in fourth place, a couple of miles behind the leaders. We had been checking our foils regularly, but nothing to see. But, during one more check, Pepe Ribes saw something.”
The team immediately sailed the boat backwards to clear the keel and then, the fight was on. “Slowly, but surely, we reeled the boats ahead in,” described Bekking. In the end, the team clawed past PUMA by less than a minute, crossed through the gate and tacked immediately to avoid the western perimeter of the ice exclusion zone.
The fleet has a lateral separation of 14 miles from east to west and all are headed due south, all having crossed through the scoring gate. They are currently 213 nm due south from Cape Race on the southeastern tip of the Avalon Peninsula on the Canadian Island of Newfoundland, where the cliffs rise nearly vertically to 30.5m above sea level.
The position of the ice exclusion zone is the reason for the fleet having to turn south and Telefónica Black, the easternmost yacht is parallel to, but 106 nm from, the western corner of the zone. The fleet must now sail 175 nm along the bottom of the zone, while still keeping a careful lookout for ice, before they can swing north again. The northeast corner of the box has today been extended to latitude 40 degrees west, due to ice sightings in the region.
Green Dragon skipper Ian Walker had this to say about their run for the gate “Today is a very good day. First and foremost we are out of last place and are less than an hour behind all the other boats after making big gains to the South.
Secondly the sun is out and although it is still a bit foggy, it is a wonderful spring like day. The sea is flat and the boat is dry inside and out.
Thirdly we have just opened the huge block of Award Winning Irish farmhouse cheese given to us by Good Food Ireland (thanks again). Sadly we don’t have any red wine to wash it down with, but we did find some spicey sausage to accompany it. It makes a welcome break from the freeze dried food.
Fourthly my head cold is subsiding so I can think straight at last.
Tactically we benefitted from a few boats reaching hard for the scoring gate and also from a change to the forecast which meant that being south was an advantageous thing. We always knew the first half of this leg would be very hard for us sailing upwind and reaching. Damaging the daggerboard on the lobster pots made it much harder. Our sole aim has been to stay in touch before the downwind sailing starts. The forecast is for all downwind from the second ice gate and for much of that to be in very windy conditions.
We have not sailed in close proximity to the other boats in weather like that, so it will be interesting for everyone. The whole leg is setting up for a grandstand finish in Galway Bay. Mind you if it is blowing over 30 knots Galway Bay will be a pretty tricky place to negotiate.
Meanwhile Ericsson 3 has hit a whale and did some damage to one of their keel fins. Aksel Magdahl explains in his email today “Everything lined up perfectly for full points at the scoring gate until early yesterday morning when a couple of big whales appeared out of the thick fog. We managed to avoid the first one, but we only saw the tail of the next one as it dived just in front of us. We hit with both the keel and the daggerboard, and the boat came to a complete stop with some bad noises from our appendages. We could see that the keel fin fairings were damaged or off in a big area, but the daggerboard looked ok. We hope the whale got away only with some bruises; we did what we could to avoid it.
With the rough fin, we immediately lost our lead and slowly went to the back of the bunch with terrible performance numbers for the next 24 hours. When we tacked this morning, Anders went down to take a look at the daggerboard and it became apparent that also that had been significantly damaged in the impact. Actually, a piece of it was missing.
At the moment we have locked our radar on to Green Dragon and Delta Lloyd who are just in front of us, but they are slowly pulling away. Hopefully the frontrunners will get slowed down a bit rounding the exclusion zone, but the speed loss from the keel damage will follow us for the rest of the leg.
We have been worse off before in the race though, so spirits are OK.”
Scoring Gate Order
1. Telefónica Blue at 03:11.24 GMT
2. PUMA at 03:12.04 GMT
3. Ericsson 4 at 03:33.05 GMT
4. Ericsson 3 at 04:06.02 GMT
5. Telefónica Black at 04:36.54 GMT
6. Delta Lloyd at 06:16.00 GMT
Leg Seven Day 4: 1300 GMT Volvo Ocean Race Positions
1. Telefónica Black ESP (Fernando Echávarri/ESP) DTL 1863 nm
2. Delta Lloyd IRL (Roberto Bermúdez/ESP) +3
3. Ericsson 4 SWE (Torben Grael/BRA) +4
4. Green Dragon IRL/CHN (Ian Walker/GBR) +10
5. Ericsson 3 SWE (Magnus Olsson/SWE) +12
6. Telefónica Blue ESP (Bouwe Bekking/NED) +15
7. PUMA Racing Team USA (Ken Read/USA) +16
Team Russia RUS (Andreas Hanakamp/AUT) DNS