Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:24:02 UTC
Cape Town finish line, 1324.02GMT. ABN AMRO ONE crosses the finish line and wins the first offshore leg of the Volvo Ocean Race 2005-06. They crossed the line magnificent winners of the Waterford Crystal trophy for Leg 1.
Cape Town finish line, 1324.02GMT. ABN AMRO ONE crosses the finish line and wins the first offshore leg of the Volvo Ocean Race 2005-06. A nail-biting last few hours saw the black boat’s lead narrow to under 50 miles, but they crossed the line magnificent winners of the Waterford Crystal trophy for Leg 1. Their elapsed time for the 6,400 mile leg was 19 days, 24 minutes and two seconds.
It has been a long haul for the ABN AMRO team. The original plan was formulated by Roy Heiner, a great enthusiast for this race. He secured the sponsorship of Holland’s ABN AMRO banking corporation and took a gamble with designer Juan Kouyoumdjian, a designer with revolutionary ideas but who didn’t have a solid track record of winners’ behind him. The opposition went with the established Farr design company, but, so far at least, and certainly in windy conditions, the ABN AMRO boats look as though they have the edge.
The ABN AMRO team was the only one to go with a two boat campaign, using their initial boats to develop ideas, systems and sails, but more importantly, to develop a team of younger and less experienced sailors under skippers. During intensive training the first boat set an unfortunate precedent by breaking it’s titanium keel ram mountings, but they learned from the incident and the second boat came out with new ideas, a new layout and went from strength to strength – but only when the wind was more than about eight knots.
Following their lacklustre performance in the ghosting conditions of the In Port race, too many people jumped to the conclusion that the ABN AMRO boats were slow, not just, as Mike Sanderson freely admitted, slow in winds under eight knots. “Just you wait for some breeze.” Was Mr Sanderson’s mantra, and when they got the breeze, his confidence was vindicated. The black boat took off in winds over ten knots, and in winds of 25 knots and more, it seemed as though she was a knot faster than all but her team sister.
Despite tactically backing off from flat out in the big winds, ABN AMRO ONE always maintained her lead, only threatened by the innovative and daring tactics of the Olympic Maestro Torben Grael who twice, on different sides of the equator, took Brasil 1 into the lead by making a break to the east of the bulk of the fleet. But despite all that Torben could do, it was the sheer speed of the Juan Kouyoumdjian boats that bludgeoned him into submission.
Now, with the boat heading in to a well deserved ovation from the thousands who are packing the V&A Waterfront, the ABN AMRO ONE team can relax, have a well deserved beer or two and wait to welcome in their team-mates aboard ABN AMRO TWO who look set to take the second podium place.
Positions at the time the winner crossed the line are as follows: ABN AMRO TWO 49 miles to the line, sailing at 19.4 knots. Next are Brasil 1, 100 miles astern of ABN AMRO TWO and sailing at 19.3 knots to the line. Ericsson is now 430 miles from the finish, doing 14 knots. Sunergy and Friends have 2070 miles to run, but are speeding up and now have an ETA of 7 December.
With all the attention being focussed on the leader, we shouldn’t forget that Ericsson is having her problems in getting to the finish. Neal McDonald sent us this graphic account of what it’s like when you lose control of a four and a half tonne lead bulb at the bottom of a four and a half metre fin. “Free Willy 2! Having sailed for nearly two days on starboard with the keel safely locked in place (way canted to the starboard side), yesterday morning we had a substantial wind shift and needed to gybe.
“Although we had been taking it easy on the boat, in view of the keel issues we had had two nights ago, we were all getting a bit more comfortable about our situation. Despite that, going into the gybe we knew we would have to be careful, our plan was to drop the spinnaker, centre the keel and gybe. Simple!
”Well it turned out not to be that simple in practice. Richard Mason had all the spanners out and was prepared down below to be undoing pipes and hand pumping oil from cylinder to cylinder.
“All hands on deck, the spinnaker came down no problem, Richard seemed to manage to get the keel to the middle and Dingo (David Rolfe) did a great job gybing the boat on to port. On the face of it, the hard part of the manoeuvre had been completed. Now we had to sort out all the gear on deck, which mainly involved moving a tonne of wet sails from one side of the boat to the other. I’d jumped up on deck without foul weather gear and Dingo, being fully kitted up, kindly offered me the helm so I would not get soaked transferring sails. 'Nice chap, I like the cut of his jib' I thought.
“Five minutes into my stint on the wheel, what should have been a reasonably easy task of steering in broad daylight, in about 20 knots of wind with just the mainsail up, suddenly became a very difficult task. I knew this sensation and before I heard the call of 'we have another Free Willy situation on our hands', I had fully guessed what had happened. The waves would roll the boat one way and rather than steady the boat, the keel simply stayed in the vertical plane and the boat rolled around it. Not nice.
“A couple of the guys ran down below to help Richard (he had plenty on). In 'Free Willy 1' the damaged ball valve had permitted the oil in the rams to simply run from one ram to another so the system was 'closed' and the oil itself provided a large amount of damping to the movement of the keel. 'Free Willy 2' was another ball game. In order to get any control of the keel after the initial failure Richard had to butcher the system and go direct from the hand pump to the ram.
“Moving the keel for the gybe involved another re-jig of the system. A further venture into unknown territory. In the process hydraulic oil had been force out of the system. Now the keel was rattling from side to side with much more vigour than it had the previously. Air certainly did not seem to have the same favourable damping properties as oil. Mild panic had set in down below with the boys wildly doing up bits of pipe and pumping oil from here to there. On deck I am desperately trying to keep the boat going downwind in a straight line, whilst wildly rolling from side to side.
“We sort of laugh about it now, but at the time it was far from fun. The noise and energy released as the keel slammed from side to side was staggering - Jason was down there helping and I could see from the look on his face afterwards he had far from enjoyed the moment. He was the build manager for the boat and, as such would have understood more than anyone how quickly this could have done some serious damage.
“We were stuck like this for ten or 15 minutes whilst Richard and his band of merry helpers down below wrestled with spanners, pipes, hand pumps and basically anything they could get their hands on to refill the rams with hydraulic oil and lock them in place. Full credit to them, they managed to tame it and lock the keel in the centre. Richard had succeeded again. He looked shell-shocked. He still had his foul weather gear trousers on and was absolutely covered in hydraulic fluid. I have heard foul weather gear called 'oil skins’ and that's exactly what Richard's were!
“This all happened 12 or so hours ago. Another little reminder for us just how much respect and caution we have to have for these systems. We have proceeded with even more care than before. We have no intention of trying to move the keel now until we get back to the dock and before we get a spinnaker back up the wind will have to drop quite a bit more.
“The three leading boats have shot ahead and our job now is to make sure we finish in one piece. 565 miles to go as I write this and clearly no way of catching any of the leaders particularly as we are only going at about 70 percent of our capacity. Nevertheless the sailing conditions are excellent and we have seen our first few albatross over the past few days and life is not so bad.”