Ericsson 4 is ahead of the heavy weather during Leg 5 from Qingdao to Rio de Janeiro. Image copyright Guy Salter/Ericsson 4/Volvo Ocean Race.
by Mark Chisnell
And so it begins again. Round three of the Doldrums commenced on Sunday, as most of the Volvo Ocean Race fleet followed each other, Lemming-like, over the edge (or not). The conscientious objector is the Dragon, making her play to the east.
Ericsson 4 still dominates the front of the fleet, maintaining a 20+ mile margin from PUMA and her sistership. But even as these three eye each other up for a three way fight, Ian Walker and Green Dragon threaten on the outside, going past Telefonica Blue to take back fourth.
At 10:00 ZULU, the leading trio were sailing due south in a light, ten knot easterly, with PUMA and Ericsson 3 almost side by side, about 20 miles north of Ericsson 4. Telefonica Blue was following these three southwards with a very similar breeze, about another 120 miles north of the chasing pair.
Sadly, Green Dragon’s instrument data is still not reporting back to Race HQ, and so we don’t know what wind she has at the moment. But Ian Walker and his team were about 50 miles south of where Ericsson 4 hit the wall yesterday before their rate of gain finally started to slow – so it appears that they held better breeze for longer. The Dragon’s eastern adventure has begun well after a close call with a whale.
Saturday at 10 ZULU
The first 24 hours to 10:00 ZULU Saturday saw a couple of incidents – Bouwe Bekking reported a problem with the engine propeller retraction system on Telefonica Blue. Fixing it cost them a good 20 miles. Green Dragon also had a problem, although not as serious, with Ian Walker reporting that they had caught something on the keel, then had to pull the mainsail down for an hour to repair a batten socket.
But the general trend through this period was steady gains by Ericsson 4 on all of the rest of the fleet – and that includes PUMA. And the reason why PUMA was suddenly bleeding miles was that Ken Read and his navigator, Andrew Cape, decided to trade in their westerly position. They sailed a narrower (by about 5-10 degrees), and slower (by about a knot of boat speed) wind angle through to Saturday morning, and ended up joining Ericsson 3, sitting in Ericsson 4’s wake.
Meanwhile, both Telefonica Blue and Green Dragon gave up a little of their more easterly position. The Dragon did it willingly and, as Walker put it in that same email, ‘stopped the loss of miles for a while’. We don’t know what breeze they had through this period, but Telefonica Blue didn’t have much choice, as they found themselves with an east-southeasterly, while the leaders enjoyed a north-easterly – they had to move west, and lost miles doing it.
Much to the disgust of the Navigators Union, this critical period of fine-tuning for the entry into the Doldrums was blighted by a lack of weather information. The satellite outage that we’ve featured in this article and this dot tv clip, was exacerbated by a blind spot in the coverage of the Fleet 33 system.
The navigators have been using this slower Satcom system as a back-up to download their weather. But, as Ericsson 4’s man-in-the-nav-station, Jules Salter, explained it shut down on them at just the wrong moment.
That left the boats with the good old weather fax - giving those of a certain age the opportunity to get all misty eyed about those joyous moments when, after hours of fiddling and poking, the damn thing finally stopped hissing and started squawking as it tuned in and received a map. Although it sounds as though Salter was having more luck than Tom Addis aboard Telefonica Blue, who was still struggling as they went into Sunday. And by then, it was too late anyway.
Sunday at 10:00 ZULU
Ericsson 4 had the gas to make further gains into the early afternoon on Saturday. I’m not quite sure how or why, but the conditions let Torben Grael and his team put another 20 or so miles on their lead. That was it though, the squeeze box had stretched to its fullest extent, and it was about to start compressing.
The wind speed and wind angle graphs tell the tale. At 04:00 ZULU on Sunday morning, Ericsson 4 hit the wall - but Grael and Salter must have been delighted with the hand they were holding. Puma and Ericsson 3 were still trailing in their wake, and even Telefonica Blue had dropped into line behind them. It seemed that the pre-determined Doldrums crossing point, that Bouwe Bekking was telling us about a few days ago, was the same point that had been chosen by the leading trio. So the only boat with any significant amount of leverage on the leader was Green Dragon, a 100 miles to the east, and at that stage almost 300 miles behind.
Initially, Ericsson 4 was forced to tack to starboard, in a bid to find new breeze. They really struggled for about five hours, but by 09:00 ZULU Sunday morning they had settled into a reasonable lane of east-southeasterly breeze, and were matching the speed of the fast-slowing PUMA behind them.
Ken Read and his team didn’t have anything like as messy an entrance into the Doldrums, staying on port tack all the way. Which was probably just as well, as they hadn’t got around to re-attaching their newly repaired starboard wheel. But it was Ericsson 3 that hit a grand slam, holding the breeze and their speed until they were alongside PUMA. It’s been full on for these two ever since, trading second place.
Aboard PUMA, navigator Andrew Cape was taking it all with his normal equanimity. Cape reported that they had cleared the worst of the clouds, and were up and moving again. After the leader’s initial encounter, the breeze does seem to have stabilised into the light east to east-southeasterly that they still have this morning, with those behind enjoying a progressively less unpleasant transition into the lighter wind. That’s now allowing everyone to make decent, albeit slower, progress – and dry everything out. Doubtless, as Cape pointed out, once everything is dry, they will all start complaining about going slowly...
So far, this is setting up to be a different Doldrums experience to those that we have seen before – more prolonged, but less intense. Cape was predicting that the fleet would end up very bunched together, as they faced almost 2000 miles of light air. Not all of that should be the Doldrums, as normally they would expect to clear the ITCZ (it’s proper name) by 10 degrees S, transiting into the south east trade winds and then edging past the subtropical-high - as discussed in the Leg 5 Preview.
But we're into the cloud zone now.
Looking at the weather, it doesn’t look like they will ever hit a well-defined band of solid trade winds. Instead they will pick their way through a lot of blurry transition zones, with the wind barely poking over ten knots for the next week. This is the critical section of this Leg, whoever sidles through this minefield fastest and hits the Southern Ocean first is likely to build a lead that won’t be broken down before Cape Horn.
Initially, it looks like all the gains will go to Green Dragon. Today’s Predicted Route image is for the boat positions and weather in three days time, and shows the leading trio struggling past Vanuatu in a bubble of high pressure, with Green Dragon and Telefonica Blue out to the east, and closing to within 60 miles of the lead.
But we’re in the cloud zone now, and whether or not they can actually make that gain, never mind turn it into a pass, will depend on a little luck and some good sailing - playing the clouds and the wind shifts. Certainly, the strategists aboard the Dragon have positioned the boat to make a significant profit, now it falls to the boys on deck to convert.
Volvo Ocean Race
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