Volvo Ocean Race 2005-2006

Overview

Southampton - Cape Town - Melbourne - Wellington - Rio de Janeiro - Baltimore - New York - Portsmouth - Rotterdam - Gothenburg

Winner: ABN AMRO ONE

It was a tour de force in every way. When ABN AMRO ONE lifted the trophy at the end it was a deserved prize for a display of power sailing that blew all the opposition away.

If the crews on the water were tested as never before, so were the crews ashore as they fought to keep the show on the road against all the odds and in the face of an early spate of technical and engineering problems.

One life was lost, one boat was lost, and a whole new style of racing had been born which excited offshore racing sailors all round the world and opened up a whole new era of trans-oceanic sprints. Nothing had been seen like it before.

A new boat, the Volvo Open 70 was on view at a new start port in north-west Spain – Sanxenxo/Vigo – and a feature was the in-port races, which would account for a fifth of the points.

The weather then relented to stage a start almost too benign, lulling one of the biggest spectator crowds ashore ever seen into believing that all would be straightforward as the fleet disappeared towards the Atlantic.

There had been a desperate least-minute rush to make the Australian yacht entered by Grant Wharington street legal with just two hours to spare. Perhaps if he had known what was waiting for him he would not have been I such a hurry as one of those infamous weather systems that sweep up the Bay of Biscay gathered strength and delivered a haymaker of a punch.

Paul Cayard’s Pirates of the Caribbean was the first to notify race control that they had serious problems and were heading to safety after just 12 hours. This was followed by a similar call from Bouwe Bekking at the helm of the home team movistar.

Pirates was later shipped by air from Portugal to Cape Town. Major repairs to the interior structure and canting keel mechanism were then completed in a specially constructed boatshed dockside on the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront as movistar chose a container ship for its passage to South Africa.

As two of the favourites paid the price for trying to keep up with ABN AMRO ONE, Mike Sandesron in ONE and Seb Josse in TWO were both storming to the front – though Sanderson had to fit emergency steering after being swamped by a huge wave and had to cope with a fire in the battery compartment, while Wharington peeled off into Madeira to repair the boom.

Both ONE and then TWO broke the 24-hour distance record, the ‘kids’ on TWO eventually beating their senior bretheren with a run of 546nm.

With Ericsson also suffering swing keel control problems, ONE and TWO were one and two into Cape Town, just six hours apart. Brasil 1 was third, with the rest the walking wounded.

Leg 2 to Melbourne, after a wild in-port race in Cape Town, started calm but quickly emulated leg one as Ericsson first reported keel hydraulics problems and Brasil 1 cracks in the deck structure. Ericsson took the container ship option, Brasil 1 tried to catch up after repairs and then lost her mast, so she had to be trucked across Australia to Melbourne.

Both Pirates and movistar pulled into Albany for temporary repairs the ABNs made it another one/two with the Aussies earning a huge cheer from their home town fans.

The pitstop in Wellington saw the Aussies absent as they opted to make major modifications and rejoin the race in Baltimore while movistar took a penalty for doing more repairs before setting out for Cape Horn and the run up to Rio de Janeiro.

Jan Poortman missed that leg on ABN AMRO TWO because of a back injury and movistar had to pull off the track again in Ushuaia at the tip of South America as they fought to avoid sinking and asked yachts both ahead and behind to be ready to come to the rescue.

Once again it was the structure around the top of the swing keel and it took some heroic efforts to fire up the pumps and save the boat. Sanderson had put in a major display of power to beat Cayard’s Pirates, while Torben Grael was very disappointed not to be first into his home country.

For the next leg to Baltimore, Neal McDonald was replaced by the American John Kostecki as skipper of Ericsson – though remaining as a watch leader – as movistar took an early lead only to be pipped by ABN AMRO ONE closet to the finish in Cheapeake Bay.

The next leg to the New York pit stop, the seventh left its indelible imprint on the race as Seb Josse, skipper of ABN AMRO TWO had to cope with picking up Hans Horrevoets after being washed overboard in an angry North Atlantic. But he could not be revived and then Josse had to summon all the calm strength he could muster to go to the aid of Bekking and his crew as they left a movistar again threatening to sink.

Although winning the leg to Portsmouth, the mood on ABN AMRO ONE was sombre and some of the heart had gone out a race that continued to Horrevoets’ home country, The Netherlands, and the port of Rotterdam.

But the last, to Gothenberg, had some of the features which make sport so compelling as Cayard won the sprint, the ABN AMRO TWO crew took second by just four minutes and the overall winners on ABN AMRO ONE were last of the six remaining boats but first overall in what had been an astonishing round-the-world display.