VOR: Battle of Nerves

Silhouettes on leg 6. Image copyright Rick Deppe/PUMA Ocean Racing/Volvo Ocean Race.

by Cameron Kelleher

According to the Art of War, the Chinese military treatise, you keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Well, in the skirmish on the South Atlantic battlefield, the Volvo Ocean Race fleet is taking Sun Tzu’s advice. None more so than PUMA.

“The two Ericssons are in sight,” says PUMA's navigator, Andrew Cape, gesturing towards the sisterships. “Telefonica Black behind us there, to windward, Telefonica Blue out to sea in front, Delta Lloyd abeam of us just in front by 20 miles.

"It will be interesting to see how it works out as we are the leeward boat and we’ve got to hope we can hang in here for another day. If the wind suits us down here then we’ve got to make our play for the big island.”

The “big island” is Fernando de Noronha, the scoring waypoint on Leg 6. As Cape was speaking it was a 700-mile drag race away to the north. Now that they are in the south-east trades it should be champagne sailing. Forget it says, Delta Lloyd’s Wouter Verbraak. It’s more cheap lager than Laurent Perrier.

As for strategy and tactics, it’s trench warfare on PUMA, according to Deppe. “We don't worry too much at this stage of the game about having all the fancy stuff the same way we did at the start of the race, it’s just head down in the trenches trying to get the job done with what you have.”

Meanwhile, the emails from the boats over the past 24 hours are dotted with references to clouds and squalls and potholes. There has been a spate of raids on sail wardrobes as a result.

According to Ericsson 3’s Gustav Morin, conditions overhead have been clouding the crew’s performance. “We have not been sailing very well the last couple of hours,” he said. “It has been very tricky conditions with a lot of squalls and we been on the limit of the range between two sails.

"We have changed from the masthead zero to a smaller headsail about six times in four hours. We have also lost a lot to most of our opponents. Most obvious we lost a lot to Ericsson 4 who had been just beside us for a long time.

"We are generally trying to avoid the big squalls but it seems that we sometimes just have to go straight into them. Once early this morning we were really happy to being able to avoid a big cloud while Ericsson 4 didn't. Unfortunately for us they got more wind inside the cloud and took off a couple of miles while we were lying still with no breeze at all. It’s tricky to foresee which cloud will pay off and which will not.”

Green Dragon skipper Ian Walker concurs. “Some boats lose more than others in the clouds which get dealt fairly randomly, particularly at dawn and dusk,” he said. “In the last 24 hours we have done fairly well at stopping the losses and that would seem to vindicate our slightly more offshore position.

"Our job now is to work hard to stay as close as we can for when the race opens up later in the leg.”

Hard work was the order of the day on “the night of the clouds” on Telefonica Blue, said skipper Bouwe Bekking. “The only thing I can say is that we survived, it could have been way worse. We parked up three times, and with parking I mean zero boat speed for a while. But we are still in front, I have seen several times in similar conditions, that the losses can be worse.

"We worked our butts off. I don't know how many sail changes we have done, so very irregular sleep, you could be just 10 minutes in the bunk and you were called up again, but since it is warm, I don't really mind.”

The fruits of Bekking’s labour are reflected in the leaderboard standings. By the 16:00 GMT Position Report, Telefonica Blue was maintaining her lead over Ericsson 4 (+10 miles Distance To Leader). Taking an offshore routing, Bekking and his men were within 200 miles of the Itabuna lighthouse on the Brazilian coast.

In the same bunch as Telefonica Blue was Delta Lloyd (+18) and Telefonica Black (+26). On the eastern flank, along with Ericsson 4, were Ericsson 3 (+23) and PUMA (+29). Green Dragon (+37), more centrally-positioned, was hanging in there.

Volvo Ocean Race