Dave Kneale / Volvo Ocean Race
It will be great to get back to Ireland, but there's a lot of hard sailing to get there...
Saturday 16 May 2009 18:00 GMT
After racing eastwards back up the harbour and renegotiating the freighter which was still coming in, Telefonica Blue led comfortably out into Broad Sound. She was chased by her teammate, Telefonica Black, as they rounded the final channel marker.
PUMA has held the third placed they grabbed from Green Dragon at the bottom mark. And while Ian Walker and the Dragonistas were also passed by Ericsson 4 on the final upwind leg, they’ve held off Ericsson 3. So the Nordics rounded that final channel mark in sixth, with Delta Lloyd bringing up the rear as the fleet disappeared into the fog, and set off north-eastwards up the coast of New England.
Next stop, Galway. Start pouring that Guinesss.
Saturday 16 May 2009 17:41 GMT
Telefonica Blue rounded the bottom mark at the head of the fleet, followed by Telefonica Black, PUMA slipping through just ahead of Green Dragon, Ericsson 4 and Ericsson 3. Delta Lloyd is a distant 7th, after the freighter incident.
Saturday 16 May 2009 17:30 GMT
After a successful second start, Telefonica Blue led her sistership around the first mark, followed by Green Dragon just holding off PUMA, then Ericsson 4 and Ericsson 3 - but Delta Lloyd was pushed away from the mark by the coastguard because of an approaching freighter, causing some confusion for the commentary team on the water.
Saturday 16 May 2009 17:00 GMT
The fleet has been recalled to the start line after the start gun malfunctioned. A new start time has been set for 13:20 local, 17:20 GMT.
Saturday 16 May 2009 16:30 GMT
The fleet is off the dock, with each boat leaving to a raucous cheer as well as their theme songs. The wind is up near 10 knots, and it looks like great conditions for the race start.
The boats will start, and do a lap of Boston Harbor before heading out to sea and onwards towards Galway.
PUMA left with a special guest on board. Salma Hayak, the actress and godmother of il mostro, will sail with the team until shortly before the race start.
You can listen to live audio coverage of the start, right here, beginning at 16:45 GMT.
15:45 GMT update
Riath Al-Samarrai has a final report before he gets on a media boat for the start:
Babies and kids everywhere. Telefonica Blue's Tom Addis is holding one, Green Dragon's Damian Foxall is pushing one in a stroller, and PUMA has a boat full of them.
It used to be very different back in the day, but times have changed. "We're getting older," explained Brad Jackson, the Ericsson 4 watch captain, a child in tow as he speaks. This is his fifth race and he has noticed the difference. "We're all old and settled down now."
As settled down as you can be when racing around the world "looking for a man buzz", to paraphrase the wife of one PUMA sailors.
Family are not the only ones milling around the race village at the moment. There are thousands of spectators here today, enjoying the sunshine and, in the instance of one visitor, taunting the guys on stilts that promote Discover Ireland.
Speaking of Ireland, Green Dragon, who partially represent the country, will be getting a helping hand to get to Galway. As announced yesterday, navigator Ian Moore will be aided by the opinions of 200,000 people who play the online game. The team will send the game players a poll every 12 hours, allowing the online community to vote on routing options. "We still have the right to reject what they suggest," explained Moore. But so far he has had no issues. "We just issued our first poll, asking how we should stack the boat," he said. "Thankfully they came back with a good answer."
Moore was down at the dock, along with almost everybody else at this stage. Roger Nilson is a late arrival, but he looks excited. "It should be fun," he says. He also thinks it's blowing 10 knots right now so the breeze shouldn't be an issue.
It's nearly time to get going.
15:30 GMT update
The skippers and their crews are boarding their boats now, with departures scheduled over the next half hour. The wind conitnues to build on Boston Harbor, with the breeze now 6-9 knots. The forecast is for about 12 knots at start time, which is about 90 minutes away.
Ken Read received a warm send-off down to the pontoon from the crowd, who clearly appreciate their hometown hero. And Ian Walker too, was given a loud cheer from the big Irish contingent who are here from Galway.
14:45 GMT update
We have made some progress. Or rather the wind gods have.
"I'd say it's about seven knots," claims Dave Endean, the Ericsson 4 pitman and boat captain. Better still, he is forecasting 11 or 12 knots for the start. Houston, we have lift-off. Well, not quite.
Endean, like most, is not taking this leg lightly. "It's in the back of our minds, what happened last time," he says. "There's no complacency."
And that applies to their attitude towards the leaderboard as well. Endean's team are 12.5 points clear of Telefonica Blue but, as the crew has chorused over and again this week, "nothing is decided yet". Endean added: "We will push 100%. We always want to win."
There's a school of thought that it would take some damage to the boat to stop them achieving that goal and, with that in mind, Endean is cautious. "There are a lot of dangerous elements to this leg; stuff in the water, icebergs, and the Atlantic can get really tough. If the conditions get too bad we will probably back off a bit because we cannot afford to break the boat."
Down on the docks, it's still very laid back. A handful of shore crew are scattered between the seven yachts, making a few final tweaks. Gabri Olivo, the Telefonica Blue media crewmember, is hard at work, as always, doing something with cameras. We're really painting a picture with words right now.
Meanwhile, the work continues in taking down the team bases. Apparently it used to take Telefonica four days to take down and pack their base, but now it is all done in 24 hours.
Progress all round.
14:00 GMT update
Riath Al-Samarrai has been trolling along the docks and the team bases this morning, and files this dispatch:
It's hard to avoid the cliche about calms before storms, but it's certainly very tranquil here in the race village in the final hours ahead of the leg seven trip across the Atlantic.
At Ericsson, floorboards are being lifted in the team base, shore crews going through the motions of "bump out" before taking their part of the circus to Galway. Joao Signorini, Ericsson 4's trimmer and helmsman, is casually tapping away on a laptop.
Further down the lane, PUMA's sailors all seem to have arrived, fully branded and standing around. Michi Mueller, one of their all-rounders, is among the last to join the party, walking with his partner and newborn baby. They are talking in another language, German probably, so the eavesdropping mission failed.
Delta Lloyd's Nick Bice is strolling purposefully down the corridor of containers. Expectations are growing all the time for his team, slow starters in the first half of the race but podium holders at three of the last four scoring stations. "We just want to get to Galway in one piece," he says. "We have had some good results and we are keen to keep getting them. But the most important thing is that we get to Galway in one piece and keep fighting hard. If we are standing on the dock in Galway and every one is safe, the boat is one piece and we know we've done our best we can't ask for much more than that."
At Telefonica we are getting mixed messages. One of our snitches informs us that their shore crew is dismantling the team base to the tunes of Metallica, the very same group that play the Ericsson 4 team song. It's a bit slow on real news here right now. It's oh so calm.
So calm, in fact, that Bice thinks it's only blowing five to six knots. "A light start," he says. "But it'll pick up."
Calm before the storm? Cliches, wonderful cliches.
13:45 GMT update
It has turned into a beautiful spring morning. The breeze is building, although that's cooling things off in the race village. And the Saturday morning crowd is building as well. Irish fiddlers are playing on the main stage, getting people in the mood for Galway.
13:00 GMT update
The forecast for today is for moderate sea breeze conditions by race time. For start time - 13:00 local time (17:00 GMT) - race meteorologist Matt Sanders is predicting a 10 to 15 knot sea breeze.
Currently, the wind is light and the sky is clearing rapidly. It's mostly sunny now and reasonably warm (approaching 20-degrees), and promises to be a nice spring day.
We'll have full coverage of the race re-start right here, including live audio commentary beginning at 16:45 GMT, 15 minutes before the scheduled race start.
Read Mark Chisnell's leg preview right here.
Or check out Riath Al-Samarrai's report from yesterday's skippers' press conference here.
Rick Tomlinson / Volvo Ocean Race