Guo Chuan/Green Dragon/Volvo Ocean Race
Yesterday the freeway bit back - the highway to hell for some, the road to riches for others
Wednesday 19 November 2008 10:00 GMT
THE TEN ZULU REPORT, LEG 2, DAY 5
By Mark Chisnell
The fleet have been tearing up the freeway for three days now, smoking east towards the scoring gate at 58degE in 30+ knots (and some in the squalls) of south-westerly breeze – and then, yesterday, the freeway bit back - the highway to hell for some, the road to riches for others.
The Southern Ocean has reasserted its authority in the last 24 hours, just in case anyone was in any doubt about who was boss. We’d had the growls of warning as the fleet got deeper into the south, the big wipe-outs for Green Dragon and Team Russia that we reported in yesterday’s TEN ZULU - but no damage to anything more serious than sails and pride.
Then, yesterday morning, came the report from Ken Read that PUMA had got some serious air time off the back of a cliff.
There was an extra, ugly cracking noise as she landed and they spent the rest of the night repairing damage in some pretty serious structural elements in the bow. All fixed, they ramped her back up.
Less than 24 hours later, they slowed again. And this time, it’s more serious as Ken Read explained in an email shortly afterwards. They have been down to around ten knots of boat speed for the last five or six hours, and they’re just haemorrhaging miles. Kenny Read seems to have retained his sense of humour, but these boys must be gutted.
The Dragon has had her wings seriously clipped
It’s been just as bad for the Dragon, who’s also had her wings seriously clipped - yesterday afternoon the first report came in that they had broken the boom. Ian Walker subsequently told Guy Swindells that it had snapped about three metres from the aft end, in a 50 knot squall.
The team got the boom down below and the mainsail back up, sheeting it loose-footed, direct to the deck without the boom. Immediately afterwards, they were considering trying to pick up the spare – but this morning it was all about picking up the points at the gate, and then fixing the boom and going north. They are having to sail a narrower True Wind Angle (TWA) than the others, but they’re still moving fast. The consolation for watch captain Damian Foxall, who’s never got past Port Elizabeth on this race, is that this time he will ...
At 10:00 ZULU, things were looking pretty bright for Torben Grael and Ericsson 4 – although they won’t know it yet, both their closest competitors on the overall leaderboard are carrying injuries to their boats.
PUMA still lead the northern group of Telefonica Blue, Telefonica Black and Delta Lloyd, the latter still almost a hundred miles behind. About 25 miles to the south of them were the Ericsson twins – with younger brother E3 just 15 miles behind Torben Grael and E4 in the race east for the scoring gate. Another 40 miles to the south were Green Dragon and Team Russia, the former still going as hard as they can.
Bekking had taken a costly northern diversion
It’s been hard charging and clearly the pace has been beginning to tell. After a couple of days when there wasn’t much in it, when everyone seemed to have absorbed and learned from that first-leg stampede across the Atlantic, the differences were starting to magnify under the unrelenting examination of this Southern Indian Ocean.
PUMA had pulled about 50 miles out of Telefonica Blue, before they started to slow in the early hours of the morning. Bouwe Bekking had taken his boat on a costly northern diversion and there’s a great clip of the discussion about their strategy through this period, although it comes with a technical content warning, which also saw him lose ground to this team-mates aboard Telefonica Black. Bouwe also reported on a difficult night in this latest email.
Meanwhile Read and his team had been flying, but even that monumental effort hadn’t been enough to match Torben Grael and Ericsson 4. They had extended another 30 miles to the east in the 24 hours to this morning, before PUMA hit the canvas – floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee - and the gap is only getting bigger.
Incidentally, if you’re not particularly familiar with latitude and longitude, the easiest way to check who’s closest to the scoring gate is to use the Bearing to Waypoint (BRG_WPT in the Position Data Table in the Data Centre). Because the waypoint is set to the northern end of the gate, then the smaller the number, the closer they are – when it gets to zero, they’re at the gate.
The other thing that’s worth checking out is the extent to which the leverage between the Ericsson twins and the northern flank has closed down this morning – the 80-mile difference has been cut by about 70 percent since yesterday.
Ericsson 4 is still the champ this morning
Looking at today’s graph of True Wind Angle and True Wind Speed (TWA and TWS in the Data Centre) they’ve not had anything much different in the way of wind speed (or wind direction). But the noticeable thing is how steady their TWA has been compared to the rest of the fleet – track the orange line through the graph and you’ll see what I mean.
And that’s why Ericsson 4 is still the champ this morning – they have sailed smoothly through everything the Southern Ocean has to throw at them. Whatever squalls they’ve hit, whatever sail changes they’ve had to pull, they have managed to maintain a remarkably consistent wind angle. While all around them, boats have spent a lot more time sailing a wider TWA to change sails, or because they have too much sail up in a squall, or sailing an narrower TWA because they’ve got too little sail up in a lull.
So why has the leverage closed? I’m coming to the conclusion (bit slow on the uptake) that no one has any intention of taking any of the available exits to Cochin until they have passed the scoring gate at 58degeE.
Ericsson 4 now has only about 300 miles to go to the scoring gate, and they are going to arrive a lot earlier than the Deckman for Windows routing predicted yesterday. Once again they’ve managed to hold onto an eastbound low pressure system for longer than expected. I think that now the Ericsson boats have their noses clearly ahead in the race east, they’ve shifted mode a little, to try and switch lanes to get directly in front of the northern bunch, before they get to the gate.
They have the pedal to the metal
It might just be using a bigger sail a little more often to sail a slightly wider TWA angle, while the guys to the north – like Bekking and Fisher – have all realized they have to get the pedal to the metal and sail narrower, faster True Wind Angles to get the best score at the gate.
So I’ve run today’s Deckman for Windows for Ericsson 4’s Predicted Route (the north-east to south red line) to the Chagos Islands, which is about where they need to go after the scoring gate. The routing thinks they should gybe north now. But since they’ve obviously got no intention of doing that, I’ve put the southern end of the isochrone (the west to south-east red line) at 58degE.
It shows them hitting the gate tomorrow afternoon. Why so late when they are clocking 500 mile days? The Predictions think they are finally going to get dropped by the low pressure system they are currently sailing with – the forecast has the wind easing as low as 13 knots overnight for the leaders. But there’s another incoming low pressure system which will veer (rotate clockwise) the breeze into the west, and then by the time they get to the gate, they will have been hit by the north-westerly breeze ahead of the new cold front.
We will see people start to gybe in the westerly breeze, which gives them the best possible angle to go north-east towards Cochin, while still closing them on the gate - but the timing will be everything, they don’t want to go too far north and miss the best and earliest breeze from the new front.
Meanwhile, PUMA might take the early exit for Cochin, as Read suggested in his latest email. Can they fix the boat and build a lead they can hold on to until Cochin? Or will they get stuck in the ugly looking high pressure ridge just to the north of the storm track? Plenty of points and opportunities still on the board for everyone …
The TEN ZULU REPORT (so called because it follows the 10:00 GMT fleet position report, and Zulu is the meteorologist's name for GMT).