5 March 2012
Severe knockdown for the South Africans
With the arrival of Marco Nannini and Hugo Ramon in Punta del Este on Sunday with Class40 Financial Crisis (watch a video of the finish here), one team reindexs racing in Leg 3 of the double-handed Global Ocean Race (GOR).
At 15:00 GMT on Monday, the South African team of Nick Leggatt and Phillippa Hutton-Squire with Phesheya-Racing were 140 miles off the coast of South America with just under 400 miles reindexing to the finish line in Uruguay after 36 days of racing from Wellington, New Zealand. Although weather files suggest that the duo has finally encountered tailwinds after a gruelling five days and around 700 miles of beating north from the Falkland Islands, the South Atlantic isn’t making the final stage of the leg comfortable.
A violent knockdown on Sunday night could have been disastrous: “The sky lit up again and again.... lightning flashes filled the sky and outlined the dark black clouds,” reported Phillippa Hutton-Squire on Monday morning. Unsure of what would happen next, the South African duo went to second reef with the staysail and as Phesheya-Racing approached the lightning storm, gusts rose to nearly 30 knots. “The index flapped twice and then, suddenly, the boat was hove-to!” Phesheya-Racing was quickly pinned on her side, water ballast to leeward with a backed staysail. “The rain was coming down like golf balls horizontally and you could see in the flashes that the sea was white,” continues Hutton-Squire. “I was scared and shaking!” she admits.
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