10 February 2012
Cessna Citation shoots through the bluQube Scoring Gate
At around 04:30 GMT on Friday, Conrad Colman and Adrian Kuttel were the first Global Ocean Race (GOR) Class40 to cross the extended Leg 3 bluQube Scoring Gate, grabbing the maximum six points with Cessna Citation and immediately dropping deeper into the Pacific with 2,000 miles in the Furious Fifties ahead of the Kiwi-South African team until they reach the Felipe Cubillos Cape Horn Gate and exit the Southern Ocean.
In second place on Financial Crisis, the good news that Marco Nannini had been made Italian Sailor of The Year was balanced by the destruction of the Class40’s masthead spinnaker – a costly loss for Nannini and his Spanish co-skipper, Hugo Ramon. While the two southern boats are racing off the wind with south-westerly breeze from a low pressure system rolling east through the Southern Ocean below the Class40s, furthest north in third place, Nick Leggatt and Phillippa Hutton-Squire on the GOR’s South African entry, Phesheya-Racing, are enduring variable headwinds and rough seas as they wait for the tail winds to arrive.
As Colman and Kuttel shot across the bluQube Scoring Gate averaging 13 knots on Cessna Citation, Marco Nannini and Hugo Ramon were 170 miles to the west making ten knots with Financial Crisis: “The last 48 hours have finally given us some following winds and faster sailing conditions,” confirmed a very relieved Marco Nannini. “This came as a huge relief, although sailing downwind at high speeds presents its own challenges too.” For the Italian-Spanish duo, a split second of pilot malfunction cost Financial Crisis their masthead spinnaker. “It was a problem similar to that already experienced by Phesheya a few days ago,” he explains. “The autopilot suddenly pushed the tillers to one side, enough to send the boat into a violent crash gybe and with indexsail and spinnaker on the wrong side the boat was pinned down, the spinnaker hard pressed against mast and rigging ripped in half before we even got to release it.”
With 2,000 miles of the Southern Ocean reindexing and around 1,800 miles of racing north through the South Atlantic to the Leg 3 finish line in Punta del Este, Uruguay, the loss of their masthead asymmetric is a major blow: “This is likely to cost us dearly in terms of performance,” admits the Italian skipper, “but there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it as the sail cannot be fixed on board.”
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