VOR: ERICSSON 3 LEG FIVE DAY 6 QFB: received 19.02.09 1043 GMT

by Gustav Morin (Media Crew Member)

Wet, wet and worry

The last 20 hours have been wet. Very wet. It's warm in the water so it's not too bad, but when you're reaching steadily around 20 knots, like we are now, you get hard spray on you all the time.

The worst part with this is that your eyes get totally soaked with salt. They get red and very sore. We have helmets with eye protection and different kinds of goggles to protect them, but it's tricky to see through the glass. No solution is perfect.

This morning we had a small rip in our GS, a small staysail, and Magnus (Magnus Olsson – skipper) started to worry that we will break too many sails and that we won't have enough of them in the end of the race.

You are ‘only’ allowed to use 24 sails during the lap around the globe and we have 12 onboard during this long leg. Each of them has a very narrow sweetspot and as soon as the wind changes in strength or direction, we start to discuss a change. That is a big reason why these boats are so tough to sail. You change sails quite often and since they are very heavy, you need a bunch of strong hands to make the changes go quickly and safely.

We ripped one of our three mainsails in the last leg and before that we have smashed our G4, a small genoa.

“Maybe the winner in the end will be the one who has managed to keep the most sails intact,” Magnus thought out loud.

But our sailmaker onboard, Martin Strömberg, is not worried at all.

“We ripped our main in extreme conditions, sailing upwind to China. We will probably and hopefully not see conditions like that again and if we don't, I don't think the sails are going to cause us much problem,” Martin says and continues:

“I believe we are, together with Ericsson 4, the team in the fleet who has had the fewest problems with sails. The rip we had this morning was an easy fix, just a few stitches with the sewing machine and it was ok. We can fix it even better when we get ashore.”

Volvo Ocean Race