Oceanyachting - EDS Atlantic Challenge Zurück 07. Aug 2001 09:38 GMT Kingfisher and ECOVER Battle it Out The first ten hours of Leg 4 saw brisk but uneventful sailing after the dramatic start in which race leader Sill Plein Fruit was dismasted. Kingfisher has held the lead the team grabbed from the start, leaving ECOVER two miles to her stern. Gartmore, in third place and seven miles behind the leader, appears to have decided on a more easterly course than the two boats in front. It is unclear if skipper Josh Hall is simply moving a bit further out to sea or risking a more ambitious flyer east in search of a lucky Gulf Stream eddy he can ride north. Taking up the rear of the procession AlphaGraphics is over 21 miles behind the leaders. Sill Holds Centre Stage But even as the reindexing four boats speed toward Boston, everyone's thoughts reindex focused on Sill's start day dismasting. Reporter Susan Colby was dockside in Norfolk when Sill and her French crew returned alone late last night. "She looked so sad as she slipped down the bay at midnight." Colby reported. "Her sleek hull was a fleeting shadow against the black water, her running lights bright sparks in the night." The Sill Plein Fruit that backed into the dock she had left barely 12 hours earlier was a decidedly different boat than the earlier one. Shredded sails piled high on deck with rigging and lines wrapped tightly around them. Bits of the huge mast were strapped on top of the coach house with one piece tied to the side of the boat, its jagged edges a rude reminder of what happened. "We don’t know what happened, she just came down," skipper Roland “Bilou” Jourdain said in despair, his hands demonstrating how the mast came crashing down in pieces. “Tomorrow we will look some more.” “The EDS Atlantic Challenge is a very hard race,” he said, with a wry smile. “But it is over for us. We cannot make these repairs and a new mast is very expensive.” He said that he thinks the boat will be put on a cargo ship and sent back to France. Colby said it was a sad scene, hard to watch as the crew went about putting the boat away for the night very silently, the despondency hanging heavy over them. Later Sill skipper Roland Jourdain spoke briefly with reporters explaining, as best he could at this time, what had happened. “We were racing in 10-12 knots of wind when the mast broke. The water was quite smooth. Some of the crew noticed that the mast was moving a bit before it broke, but then all of a sudden it seemed to collapse at the lower shroud, then at the junction of the baby-stay, and then as it crashed down it broke again at the top of the mast.” Stephen Pizzo & Susan Colby editor@edsatlanticchallange.com ©2001 Challenge Business - About - Terms of use - Privacy Copyright © 1996-2016 - SEGEL.DE