ERICSSON 4 EMAILS: 'Hairy, grumpy, dominant males'

Tuesday, 24 March 2009, 0613 GMT

Ericsson 4 - Jules Salter (Media Crew Member)

Paraphrasing The Stranglers song, Bear Cage, just about sums up my final futile days on this leg.

I have almost lost track of the number of days out here, one moves seamlessly into another. Progress has been slow, weather maps and GRIB files in the southwest Atlantic make part sense, when you expect a gain you make a loss and visa versa.

The situation in the 600 hundred or so miles to Rio is complex. Light wind areas, small developing areas of low pressure and boats spread everywhere. All you can do is try and make sense of the 6 hourly weather information and draw lines and amend charts to the wind readings we get from the other four boats we receive at the 3 hourly sched times. Inventing weather is 'bad science' and expecting to know more than the men and women in beige at the weather centres is pretty dumb, but you have to try and do something. If your hokum theory lines up, you can make a plan for the next few hours. Usually the plan works for about 2 hours then the wind shifts and drops and you are back to square one trying to conjure up another scenario from your onboard observations.

About the only thing that doesn't change much, is that the miles to finish still looks a long
way....the scale of a typical premier ocean race like a Fastnet, Bermuda or Hobart....and time is running down (as is the food and diesel for power to make water) to get to Rio to have any length of time to sort the boat and oneself out. The boat certainly smells like a bear cage and the hairy, grumpy, dominant males in this cage seem to be starting to exhibit some tendencies of bears with sore heads. There seems to be a lot more growling, patrolling up and down and scavenging anything they can from the food bag. A teddy bears picnic it is not.

Received 0613 GMT