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IMOCA-Race: ECOVER BtoB 2007
www.transatecoverbtob.com - www.imoca.org - Übersicht
12.12.2007
http://www.bernard-stamm.com
Poujoulat http://www.poujoulat.fr/
Endurance, patience and caution…
Both the B to B and Barcelona Race Open 60 fleets have had plenty of problems. Having sailed from Salvador de Bahia for Port la Forêt with the objective of “breaking nothing”, Stamm is nursing his boat to make sure that Cheminées Poujoulat arrives home safely and in good shape.
The Azores High is kindly drifting towards Spain before lightening the skies over France and moving on to do the same for Scandinavia. Those of us on dry land are enjoying the calm after last weekend's storm, but for competitors in the Transat Ecover B to B, it's quite another story.
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Off the Canaries, things are dragging thanks to slack winds… worse still, they're from the wrong point of the compass. But those at the head of the fleet have found fresher conditions, and are surfing towards Finisterre at an average of 15 knots. Cheminées Poujoulat has managed to escape the calms by routing further north, and was making 18 knots this morning.
Currently sixth in the fleet, Cheminées Poujoulat is alone (although Bernard was preparing pasta for his Transat Jacques Vabre crewmate yesterday!). He is too far behind now to have any hope of catching lead boat Gitana Eighty 360 miles ahead, or Safran which leads him by 173 miles. Behind Cheminées Poujoulat by 410 miles comes Roxy. So patience is the name of the game: patience accompanied by maximum endurance, because constant trimming and re-trimming is vital to avoid pitfalls that could further delay his arrival in Brittany. Yesterday evening, Stamm was pondering the best route to take to avoid a ‘pernicious' calm. “Either I stay on starboard tack, taking the direct route and, if I'm lucky, avoid the calms, or, at the first sign of a problem, I gybe. I'll know the answer within the next few hours”. The response came during the night, and resulted in a lot of hard work. “I thought I'd managed to get out of a tight spot when, about 10 or 11 o'clock last night, the wind began to drop dramatically. The result was that, even so, I had to take port tack and set the spinnaker for about three hours, which is how long it took to find at least 16-17 knots of wind. So it was a pretty busy night, but this time, I'm definitely in the southerly airflow and out of reach of the pernicious calms. Of course, with the return of the wind, all the conditions have changed. The sky is all cloud and sometimes threatening, the sea has changed colour with a lot of grey amongst the blue… and it's full foul-weather gear for me. Autumn's here and winter's only a couple of days away”.
Now around 800 miles from the finish line, Bernard Stamm is still focused on his ballast problems, and is using only the aft ballast tank. “Everything's good on board, and I expect to arrive on Friday evening. This qualifier will then be complete and I can tick off another box in the boat preparation schedule. Those ahead of me should slow down and things should get a bit quieter, but although I'll close the gap slightly with this wind, there's no chance of catching anyone. We'll finish close-hauled, and it'll soon be time for fleeces, as well as foul weather gear…”
This information letter has been sent to you by the Rivacom agency
www.rivacom.fr http://www.rivacom.fr/
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