lunedì 30 marzo 2015

Team SCA in the Volvo Ocean Race - Painfully Tough


I believe spring is coming or has made a brief appearance in my home country of the United Kingdom. I know this because my parents tell me their tortoise has dug itself out of the ground and made an appearance and to be fair it is a fairly smart tortoise. The reality is - here in the Southern Ocean it is definitely not spring!We are 1000nm from Cape Horn and yet it still seems like a lifetime away. The sea temperatures have dipped to 8 Celsius and we are at 54S - Cape Horn is at 56S and we will probably go as far as 57.5S so temperatures will continue to drop and the risk of seeing an iceberg will increase (I am slightly excited about that, though the inherent risks are less exciting). 
 
The winds will increase, the boat will continue to fill with water and on a daily basis there will be some new difficulty… the reef line breaking, the GPS antennae snapping in an overly enthusiastic stacking maneuver.Life on board is like being in a cold damp car with no windows while someone is learning to drive, bunny hopping down the road or practicing their emergency stops. When we hit a wave and the water ploughs over the top it does so with such force that the water finds its way into the boat through every little nook and cranny so much that felt like it was raining on us one day in the galley!But that is just life onboard, that is what we expected. 

We can still boil the kettle and warm ourselves, our sleeping bags are very cosy, we are still in awe of the Albatrosses, we can still smile as we recall the wipeout or when so and so was hammering along with the FRO*.But it is painfully tough without the FRO and that is the reality for the last 18-24 hours we have been making a loss hand over fist as we miss the FRO in our sail selection and struggle to bridge the gap in the sea conditions, which can be wonderful on one gybe and hideous on another. 

It has created an interesting and incredibly challenging task in my role, trying to understand what our new speed and direction capabilities are and therefore where we are going to go in reality. Every time we gybe, it feels like it changes as we struggle to control the mighty magenta boat in some very large waves and have to downsize our sails.Sam has the incredibly hard job of making the final call on those decisions between me pushing for speed and wanting to do more maneuvers and balancing that with reality of being in control and not breaking anything or anyone and not completely depriving the crew of sleep. 

Just when I thought the steep learning curve we are on might be declining, it seems to have ramped up another level but in a different way.It is easier for some than others to understand when it is time to wind it back and accept a loss, maybe as some of us are quite naïve or perhaps a bit too gung ho! I hope that by having that we create a happy medium.It is going to be a tough 2-3days to Cape Horn (which feels like it is getting further away, despite getting closer) for us with probably four more gybes, a couple of fronts, colder temperatures, increasing breeze and a slower pace than the boats in front. 

However, a lot can happen from Cape Horn to Itajai and I still hold hope we may see another member of our fleet before the Leg is done.The navigator signing out and back to working out how we get to Cape Horn quicker! *When Team SCA Chinese gybed a few days ago, one of the main 'casualties' was the FRO - a key downwind sail, which has a sail area of 235 m². After initially trying to repair the sail and, despite the skills of Stacey Jackson the onboard sailmaker, the team decided that as the sail was so badly damaged and the repair would use all the spare sail repair kit that the team has onboard, to pack it up and not use it. 

Using all the sail making spares is risky given the miles still left to race on this leg.Now unable to use this sail the crew is forced to use smaller jibs that do not allow such open, downwind angles to be sailed efficiently - similar to missing a gear in a car. The other big sails - the Code 3 gennaker is too big to use downwind when the winds are above 30kts and the Masthead Zero is also too big in reaching conditions. Hence Libby trying to find the best routing to suit the depleted sail wardrobe. (www.teamsca.com)

Nessun commento: