Tenacious New Zealand skipper Conrad Colman is fighting an
incredible battle to finish the Vendée Globe after the mast of his
Foresight Natural Energy crashed down on the night of Friday 10th
February. Since he managed to set a jury rig four days later, he has
sailed half of the 730 miles he had still to make to the finish line to
Les Sables d’Olonne. But every mile has been a battle. He has only
emergency food rations left and only enough power for four more days if
uses the absolute minimum of power. But the tough Kiwi battler is
committed to finishing the race with no emissions, using only renewable
energies generated on board.
He spoke to Vendée Globe HQ today for the first time
since he lost the mast while racing in 30-35kts, conditions which were
manageable compared with the biggest of the storms Colman came through
in the Pacific. He has dropped from tenth to fourteenth but speaks today
of hoping to finish in five more days of sailing. He will have to
endure a couple of days of light winds midweek but is then hopeful that a
new depression later in the week will give him some faster downwind and
reaching conditions to get to the finish line. Meantime he is low on
energy and needs sunshine for his solar panels to work better.
“I am
almost clear of the TSS and so I am almost clear of the cargo ships. It
feels a bit like I am crawling across a highway. Other than that it is
going OK right now.” Of his feelings after the accident he said: “It was
unbelievable when it happened. I felt like I had been through so much
at that point. It has not been an easy Vendée Globe at all. I don’t
think such a thing exists but my one seems to have been particularly
difficult. I felt I was in the clear. I was in a crazy depression but I
had been through the eye of the storm, the wind was as forecast. I was
reaching in 30kts which, after everything I have been through, felt
pretty negligible. I had the J3 small jib and two reefs in the main
which was the right kind of sail plan for the conditions. Then when it
all fell down about my head I could not believe it. I felt like I had
failed, the stewardship of my boat, and the stewardship of my race. It
was heartbreaking. There are the emotions of ‘my race is over’. There is
the stress of the mast and sails that have just gone over the side cost
more than my house, and I have already got a mortgage on my house and
so it is pretty terrifying. Emotionally, financially, in every scenario
it felt like the pits.”
But he immediately knew he wanted to fight on, he had come too far
and gotten too close to home, and committed too much of his life: “It is
all about finishing. I called my wife, I called Race Direction and said
I did not require assistance. I was not going out. I was going to wait
and see what happened. I curled up in a ball and went to sleep. I was
numb to what had happened. That was, of course, after cutting everything
away. Then metaphorically and literally a new day dawned. I felt like I
have come all of this way and I was driven by anger and bloody
mindedness, stubbornness, to not be beaten on the doorstop of the race.
I
launched into the repairs. That was a big job. The boom is attached to
the deck rather than the mast, specifically for the reason that it can
be used as a jury rig, had snapped. And so I had a nine metres long pole
which weighs between 80 and 100 kilos fractured on the deck. So I had
to build a pile of sails to align it and then glue it back together. The
conditions were still horrendous with a four or five metres swell
breaking over the boat. But I was into a productive mindset. I was doing
something about my scenario.
And the fact that the conditions on deck
were dangerous just ignited another level of energy and passion in me,
to make feel like I could fight through this problem. People have been
very supportive in their messages and e-mails to me. They are astonished
by the energy that I can bring to bear, and the innovative solutions I
can come up with. The jury rig is just a very visible manifestation of
how I have been behaving since the start of the race. I had the keel ram
come unscrewed when I came down through the Doldrums and that could
have stopped my race right there. I found a solution with the tools I
had to do something you can normally only do in a big workshop.”
He
has next to no food left: “I started out with 100 days of food and now I
am at 105 and it took a lot of energy to prepare the jury rig and now I
am down to a couple of packets of powdered soups and am eating from the
liferaft spares. That means less than 700 calories a day...In the
European winter out here that is very little, especially when I am
working on deck so much trimming the sails.” He has four days of stored
power if he uses an absolute minimum.
“I have 350 watts of solar panels
on the cabin top which we installed just a few days before the start of
the race. My preparateur Cyril looked at me aghast when I added another
item to the job list just a few days before the end. But that is what
is keeping my race alive at the moment. At 3.5kts I cannot use my
electric motor as a hydrogenerator, that is the only thing that is
keeping me going at the moment. To be making electricity from the engine
I need to be doing seven knots which is of course double what I am
doing now. At the moment I am estimating I have five days of sailing
left and in that I will have a couple of really light days in the middle
of Biscay and then there a depression coming and I am hoping to make
good time towards the end of the week towards Les Sables d’Olonne and
hopefully I might then reach the threshold of boat speed when I can
actually charge with the hydrogenerator. At the moment I am nervously
watching the energy tick down and at the moment things don’t really add
up, I have – I think – five days of sailing through the water and four
days electricity left and so I am really hoping that I can find a
solution. Or, that the skies clear because it is grey.”
Rich Wilson, the Great American IV skipper is due in first thing on Wednesday morning in 13th place and had 217 miles left to sail this afternoon. Didac Costa, One Planet One Ocean has 595 miles to the finish and is in 15th place, due to finish Thursday.
(www.vendeeglobe.org)
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