Oceanracing 2001 - Volvo Ocean Race 2001/2002

Volvo Ocean Race 2001/2002

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Southampton, England, September 28, 2001 Week 1
Wochenbericht 23.09.-28.09.2001
Only One Thing To Do - Race

What a spectacular sight! The Solent was boiling, helicopters were howling, hundreds of cameras clicked their shutters and thousands of spectators on an unimaginable number of boats cheered when the fleet of 8 V.O.60’s finally set off for the inaugural Volvo Ocean Race on September 23 at 1500BST.
With the breeze from northerly directions at around 20 knots, all yachts set their kite in the moment the start gun was fired by HRH Price Andrew and surfed towards the Needles, surrounded by crafts from sailing dinghies to the large cruise ship Galaxy.
Leaving the Solent at the Narrows, Grant Daltons Amer Sports One led the fleet, still tightly bunched, into the English Channel. The reaching and running conditions the fleet experienced in the initial stage of this first leg to Cape Town in the Volvo Ocean Race 2001 – 2001 were what this ocean greyhounds are being built for.

After endless weeks of preparation all the teams were relieved to be under way and Alby Pratt from Team News Corp gave an insight on the emotions on board, writing, that “Everyone aboard Team News Corp was stoked to be finally on our way and actually racing after such a long build up. All the guys who were saying sad goodbyes to wives and girlfriends not three hours before now had huge grins on their faces as the realisation hit them that this is what we had come for and there was no more boat work, no more sail work, no more food to pack, there was only one thing to do and that was actually race.”
After a sleigh ride to the Western Approaches of the English Channel the yachts hit a patch of light weather. Two boats, Illbruck and Team SEB headed south in a bold move, while Tyco lead the rest of the fleet in a westerly direction. All the boats had a tough second night with little wind and drizzling rain. The mood was changing from frustration to excitement depending whether the respective boat was moving or stopping. Compared to the last race, they were all much better off in these conditions with the development of the Code 0 sails, which are in fact large overlapping masthead Genoas, even though they are measured in as Spinnakers.
Illbruck and Tyco got out of their southerly position with the breeze from the south setting in, leaving the rest of the fleet in their wake. Illbruck’s routing move to the south and staying in the inside, developed by illbruck’s navigators Juan Vila and Ian Moore worked out well and for the first time in the Volvo Ocean Race a boat could make a break.
Mark Rudiger, the navigator of ASSA ABLOY, positioned 4th at that time explained his hopes and considerations: “Right now, there is quite a complex chess game going on between cat and mouse. We have elected to invest in the west. With the approaching low pressure and associated cold front, we hope to get more lifted pressure sooner than the boats inside and south. They are closer to the mark than us at the moment but we expect to gain bearing over the next 24 hours. As the wind goes more southerly and increases, we will be waiting to see just how far it goes.”
It took no long time until the southerly breeze set in and life on board became unpleasant as the waves were building and the boats started slamming into them. Some of the sailors were still growing their sea legs, overcoming some assaults of sea sickness when the boats bounced, rolled and slammed. From on board second placed Tyco this morning, skipper Kevin Shoebridge explained what his crew were experiencing: “It has been an uncomfortable night of banging and crashing as we beat across the Bay of Biscay. illbruck has taken the lead off us by a small margin, a small period of sailing in the wrong mode is all it takes. illbruck is a few miles to weather and we are constantly monitoring bearings to gauge our performance. Dalts (Amer Sports One) is to leeward about 6 miles I guess, no one else in sight”.
Off the Galician coastline the whole fleet tacked to port and continued the highly charged battle for leadership of leg one of the Volvo Ocean Race. A birds eye view of the fleet from satellite positioning at 10.00hrs GMT on the morning of day 4 showed Amer Sports One, Tyco and illbruck side by side in their own lanes, as if racing on a track. illbruck, on the inside, had a 2 mile advantage. A small shift or any breakage would instantly drop them back.
At the tail end of the fleet, on Sept 25, at around 15:00 GMT, djuice suffered damaged to the headboard car. As a result, the team had to perform a temporary repair to keep the indexsail up. As they were sailing upwind in 35knots, it was not optimal conditions to perform this kind of repair and skipper Knut Frostad had expressed his concern over sending the bowman up the mast in such treacherous circumstances.
“We had a big problem about 24 hours ago,” said skipper Knut Frostad. He explained: “ We have made a temporary repair where we have some smaller cars we use for battens we can lash together with the top of the index. Then we have the indexsail fully hoisted by sending someone up the rig and actually lash the indexsail to the rig, which is a little risky because it doesn't enable us to reef when we want to reef. The consequences are that we have to have a permanent hoisted indexsail which can be quite dangerous. At the moment we can't have it fully hoisted because of the conditions we can't really have anyone up to lash it”.
Back at the front, the battle for pole position continued. “We will fight every second to try and get this back. It is going to be a long fight to get back in to the top again,” commented former race leader Gunnar Krantz on SEB.
After another torrid night and day of racing to windward into 3-6 metre seas, whipped up by 25 knot winds, the eight boat Volvo Ocean Race fleet were still poised for the breeze to swing. The question on every navigators lips continued to be “where from”?
By virtue of being the inside boat and closest to the next waypoint, illbruck, on the far east of the fleet, retained the lead although they have had their share of interesting moment. Co-navigator Ian Moore said this afternoon: “It has been a fairly bumpy ride the last day or so and there have been a few casualties. I won’t name and shame the hardened veterans who lost their lunch but I think everyone will be happier when the front comes through and we get to bear away a bit. People were not the only things that took a pasting. We had that sinking feeling for a while when the sewing machine came loose from its stowage on a particularly savage wave and severed the standpipe from one of the sea cocks. Thankfully it severed the pipe just above the waterline but every time we dropped off a wave we had a miniature Trevi Fountain in the forepeak. Waffler [Stu Bettany], our resident rigger come plumber, was able to rebuild it in typical Kiwi “she'll be right” bodge it fashion”.
Taking a conservative option in the middle of the pack was ASSA ABLOY. Roy Heiner’s team held the get out of jail card depending on the outcome of the weather patterns over the following twelve hours as they had options to bail out to sea [west] with Team News Corp or stick with illbruck and Tyco.
At the same time, Shoebridge was also impressed and cautious with the performance of Amer Sports One, who was within sight. “He [Dalton] is probably the fastest in these conditions. He’s been chipping away at us for the last couple of days and has now just about drawn even so these are probably his conditions. It would be naive to think he wasn’t going to be fast somewhere”.
Dalton meanwhile was also pleased with progress, even if his crew was not enjoying the ride. “It has been baptism by fire for a few of the lads as they haven't been tossed around like this for a while and these boats are very uncomfortable. With our galley situated so far forward and with nothing to brace against, cooking has been a bit of a trick, not that too many people have been hovering the food down but tomorrow the wind will start to settle down. Soon we will all be on starboard and heading towards the sun, although tricky light air awaits.
At the rear of the fleet, the crew of Amer Sports Too was happy with their progress despite a few glitches on board. “We made a little mistake on the first night when we didn’t gybe with the fleet on a small shift, which is why we are behind. The way the weather is at the moment everyone is sailing the same angles and in the same conditions and there isn’t much variant and chances to catch up,” commented Abigail Seager.
“We’ve been bailing out this morning, having found a few leaks. indexly its water coming down the index hatch and down with wet kit which is to be expected. We’ve also had a couple of leaks from the water ballast systems which leaks straight into the bunks which was a priority to sort out so we’re looking forward to the tropics to dry everything else out”.
It took the fleet until September 27 evening, to get into the westerly wind shift, they have all been longing for. At 2200 GMT they met torrential rain with squalls and shortly later the wind shifted to the west. Team SEB was the first boat to take the advantage and tacked. News Corp and Amer Sports Too followed soon after. These three boats were heading south and with the wind going further to the west the boat speed climbed immediately. Within one hour all the other boats followed.
The long port tack into the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean has given all the yachts the opportunity to watch each other carefully over 36 hours as Steve Hayles, Navigator on Tyco explained: “It is interesting to start going through the process of learning which boats are fast in certain conditions as even in a fleet as tight as this each boat will have an area where it is performs strongly.”
On the morning of the 6th day in the race, Tyco and ASSA ABLOY were within eyesight of each other while illbruck, still the hunted race leader, held a small advantage over Amer Sports One in the middle of the pack.
Way out west News Corps Navigator and double Whitbread race winner Ross Field was happy with their tactical decision. “We had been expecting the westerly earlier, but in spite of this, we’re still feeling good,” he reported late yesterday.
SEB, djuice and Amer Sports Too all had some catching up to do. With the wind on their beam, the eight-boat fleet was enjoying smoother, faster off wind sailing for the first time in four days, close reaching along at around 10 knots in 17-20 knots of breeze.
But the luck was not on the side of the lime green Swedish yacht SEB: The second headboard car failure occurred lat evening of day 5, with Gunnar Krantz’s SEB suffering from the same fate that befell djuice two days earlier.
The yacht sailed for five hours under jib alone while the crew effected a jury repair. “At 2100 GMT the car made of machined aluminium split and thus forcing us to drop the indexsail. The indexsail was down until 0200 GMT,” reported skipper Gunnar Krantz.
Asked about all the incidents during the night, Gurra Krantz explained: “It is temporarily fixed now and the fact that we have to send a person up in the rig every time we need to change the location of the headboard, should we want to reef is quite dangerous. We have already minor bruises and bashes on a couple of guys that have been up the rig, due to the fact that the waves have been very difficult. That was Tom Braidwood in the first sequence and the second sequence it was Scott Beavis, the other bowman. Those two have been fighting hard during the night and still have the rest of the crew to keep everything in order to try to race the boat as much as we can under the circumstances with just under the jib. And also tacking and shifting all the things, getting repair under way.” The way the crew handled the difficult situation made Gurra Krantz feeling more comfortable as he said: “The morale has been tremendous, everybody fought very, very hard, and I am really proud of all the guys to see them work as hard as they do and get back into the race and fix the problem that has occurred instead of talking about; To see the guys do things its really a good feeling, to see everybody handling this difficult situation.”

After 5 days the fleet has covered the first 1000 miles of the 7350 mile long leg. One of the decisive factors will be the crossing of the equator in week 2.