VOR: Ready to Race in Boston

Crowds in the Volvo Ocean Race village at Fan Pier, Boston. Image copyright Rick Tomlinson/Volvo Ocean Race.

by Sophie Luther

The Volvo Ocean Race fleet is ready to race in Boston with seven boats set to compete on Saturday afternoon in the Boston In-Port Race. In preparation, on Friday, under bright, sunny skies, the teams took to the water for the practice race.

But first, the skippers met the media for a morning press conference ahead of Saturday’s racing.

Local hero Ken Read, the skipper of PUMA and an alumni of Boston University where he had a distinguished college sailing career, insisted his team wouldn’t have an undue advantage with local knowledge. He says most of his sailing was done up the Charles River, nearer to the school.

“It’s unfortunately a bit of a myth that we’ve sailed in these waters a lot,” he said. “I tried to convince the organisers to move the race course up the river; I’d sailed about a thousand races there at Boston University. But in Boston Harbor there isn’t much sailboat racing... So this is a bit of an unknown for us too. Yesterday was the third time I’d ever been in that body of water. So the idea that we have local knowledge, unfortunately, isn’t really true.”

The race course will be in Broad Sound, just outside Boston Harbor. The first of two scheduled races is to start at 13:00 on Saturday afternoon. The two races will be scored as a series, with the winner claiming 4 points towards the overall leaderboard. Second place on the day earns 3.5 points and so on.

Ian Walker’s Green Dragon crew will have a new helmsman for the in-port race, with Walker relinquishing the helm to veteran Neal McDonald.

“We're making some changes at the back of the boat. Ian Moore (the usual navigator) is back in the UK, so I'm going to do navigation and tactics and Neal McDonald is going to take the helm.”

In contrast, Ericsson 3 is making no changes. The team has performed very well offshore, but its position on the overall leaderboard is compromised by poor in-port race results. Watch captain Richard Mason explained:
“We’re not making any changes at all which some might see as a strange move...but we feel we’ve solved many problems with this team over the course of the race,” he said. “We felt we owed it to the team to resolve the problems with the in-port racing ourselves... We’ve had a couple of really good days out training and built some confidence in the crew and we hope to cut down the mistakes tomorrow.”

After it was pointed out to Delta Lloyd skipper Roberto ‘Chuny’ Bermudez that Mike Sanderson, who won the last race as skipper of the boat Delta Lloyd is now using, was in town, Chuny joked that he would track him down for some advice:
“Where is he (Sanderson)? I have to start looking for him. For sure he knows the boat very well and I’d have a lot of questions for him!”

Conditions are forecast to be quite light at race time on Saturday afternoon, with six to eight knots of wind expected. In the past, those light conditions have favoured the two Telefonica boats.

“People say it’s going to be light and tricky and normally we sail well in those conditions,” said Telefonica Blue co-skipper Iker Martinez. His thoughts were echoed by Telefonica Black skipper Fernando Echavarri: “I think we will have good conditions for the Telefonica boats.”

The overall race leader is Ericsson 4, who have built an increasingly comfortable 13-point margin on the leaderboard. But skipper Torben Grael said his team will fight as hard as ever.

“I think everyone wants to grab the points which are very important on the inshore races and we’ll do the same,” he said.

Volvo Ocean Race