17.11.2008
Leg One Day 3
PUMA MAKES A MOVE
This morning at 0810 GMT Ken Read/USA decided to take PUMA further north and spent three hours on port gybe before gybing back again at just after 1100 GMT, dipping behind Ericsson 4 (Torben Grael/USA) Ericsson 3 (Anders Lewander/SWE) and Green Dragon (Ian Walker/GBR) but gaining some valuable northing. The black cat is now just 16 miles south of Telefónica Blue (Bouwe Bekking/NED), which is the furthest north.
Andreas Hanakamp (Team Russia) and Roberto Bermudez, the new skipper onboard Team Delta Lloyd followed suit and gybed. The fleet is spread across a north/south divide of 66 nm between Ericsson 4 in the south and Telefónica Blue in the north.
Being the furthest to the north, Telefónica Blue is showing top of the leaderboard, and PUMA’s move to the north has moved her up to second place. Ericsson 3 has recorded the fastest 24-hour run of 495 nm in the past 24 hours, and, over the past hour, has had the highest average speed of 22.5 nm.
Navigator Simon Fisher says that onboard it is pretty wet, but luckily the weather is kind and not too cold and the nights are well lit by the moonlight. “Right now,” he says, “we are being conservative and steady, ready to pounce when the conditions start to swing our way.” Fisher, after having very little sleep in the first 36 hours of the leg has had some quality time in his bunk, which he says has made all the difference. “I’m feeling good and looking forward to what lies ahead. For sure, this is going to continue to be the closet of races, so it is going to pay to be alert.”
The fleet is now out of the worst of the Algulhas current, which runs south down the east coast of South Africa. Over the shallows of the Agulhas Bank, it meets cold water and the westerly winds coming the other way from the Southern Ocean. The result is a notoriously rough piece of water. “The unpleasant part of the current is that it pressures the waves into strange, unpredictable towers,” said Ericsson 3 skipper Anders Lewander last night. “The sea looks quite like the lava fields in Lanzarote, but blue and living,” he said.
Some of the teams are suffering from ‘flu and it is inevitable that it will spread through the boat. Ken Read (PUMA) says his head is ‘killing him’, but it is not just ‘flu. “I just smashed it into a winch structure under the deck getting my foul weather gear off. You would think that I would know it was there by now,” he said.
Matt Gregory, the navigator onboard Delta Lloyd is also suffering. “I’ve developed a cold over the past two days. It’s most likely a reaction to the five immunisation shots that I was required to receive by the racing rules just before we left Cape Town,” he says. “I have lost my voice, gained a fever, a headache and generally feel awful.” But, he adds that he will keep smiling, encouraging performance and personally trying to find the fastest path to India that he can.
Leg Two Day Three: 1300 GMT Volvo Ocean Race Positions
(boat name/country/skipper/nationality/distance to finish)
Telefónica Blue ESP (Bouwe Bekking/NED) DTF 3928 nm
PUMA Racing Team USA (Ken Read/USA) +6
Telefónica Black ESP (Fernando Echávarri/ESP) +11
Ericsson 3 SWE (Anders Lewander/SWE) +14
Green Dragon IRL/CHN (Ian Walker/GBR) +17
Ericsson 4 SWE (Torben Grael/BRA) +30
Delta Lloyd IRL (Roberto Bermudez/ESP) +56
Team Russia RUS (Andreas Hanakamp/AUT) +60
Position reports are issued daily at 1300 GMT by email; however, positions are updated every three hours on www.volvooceanrace.org. Click on RESULTS at the top of the page to go straight to the points table and onboard data.
|
