The layers start to come off on board PUMA Ocean Racing, on leg 5 of the Volvo Ocean Race, from Qingdao to Rio de Janeiro. Image copyright Rick Deppe/PUMA Ocean Racing/Volvo Ocean Race.
by Kenny Read (skipper)
Back in action after 36 hours of pure misery with the stomach flu. I won't get into graphics but it wasn't pretty. As if any of us needed to lose any more weight. I may be running marathons in my next sporting venture because I will certainly have the physique for it.
Plodding along at a snail’s pace right now, frustrated because we can't make any real progress on the Ericssons and are making painfully slow progress on the finish line. At least if we are to be out here longer than projected, give us a weather window to make a run at the two leaders! A simple delivery from here is no fun. Eight hundred plus miles to go, and we are light air upwind at the moment making very little ground.
I am sure we aren't the only boat complaining of lack of food at this point, but we are starting to run pretty low and every routing run we do after we get new weather is showing longer and longer elapsed times. But even with all that, the tempo on board the boat is still high and the spirits are generally up beat. Pretty good seeing what we have all been through. We were always threatened with a 40 day leg, and it looks like that may be the reality or darn close to it. Long time to be on one of these yachts, I can tell you that.
The upside is that most of us have broken out a fresh set of clothing for the final dash to the finish. I wonder if this is what could have gotten me sick. You would have thought that the flu that hit the crew hard the first five days of this leg had run its course and gone, but yours truly got it with a vengeance. About four hours after I changed clothing. All my new clothes stored in ziplock bags. I'll have to ask a doctor someday if there is some correlation between the two or mere coincidence.
Finally from a competition side of things, it will be interesting to match up against the boats that were shipped here again in the inshore and the next leg. One by-product of not sailing this leg is that your allotted sails will only have to sail about 2/3 of the mileage that our sails will have. Quite a nice little edge if managed correctly. It will be interesting so see if there is a speed improvement against the group from the boats that were shipped to Rio. Just a thought.
To say at this point that we are looking forward to our families, that first cold beer and a big fat steak...this is the understatement of the century. If the Wind Gods would only cooperate a bit.
Volvo Ocean Race
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