| At sea. Volvo Ocean Race: ABN AMRO ONE steams on ahead |
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| Monday, 09 January 2006 | |
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Camilla Green and Tim Kelly: ABN AMRO ONE has clocked up some impressive distances in the last 24 hours as they have latched onto a low pressure system enabling them to sail 507 miles in a day and notching average speeds of 21.1 knots nearing their ‘race best’ of 22.7 knots. Behind them, following an epic tussle with the imposing Black Pearl, ABN AMRO TWO is hoping for a change in fortune as stronger winds are forecast ahead. But life is far from easy and Mike Sanderson is finding the going particularly stressful. The fear for the crew of ABN AMRO ONE is that they will hit some very light winds and watch their lead disappear or that they break the boat in the current conditions. This means, for Mike and the team, that with the buffer they have created to the chasing pack they are keeping the boat well within its limits and are focusing on keeping it in one piece. But the balance for Mike is a tricky one – up ahead there is potential for ABN AMRO ONE to be forced into an area of light winds which would give the following boats the chance to eat into the lead that they have worked so hard to create. As skipper, this makes the decisions tough. Mike commented: “The biggest stress for us at the moment is breaking the boat. We’ve been launching the boat off waves at speeds of more than 30 knots and at the end of the day it’s a carbon structure designed for its rigidity, and even though we’re trying to slow it down hurtling off, and then down a wave is very stressful. There’ll be a lot more grey hairs on my head at the end of this leg, that’s for sure. It’s just unbearable at times, it really is. Yesterday it just about drove me to being physically ill, just with the worry, and that obviously has an effect on the guys because there’s stress and tension in the air. But the guys are doing an amazing job of sailing the boat as smoothly as we’ve practised. We have modes where it’s all about the last hundredth of a knot and we’ve got modes where it’s about sailing at 90 per cent. The last couple of days it’s been about sailing at 90 per cent, it’s been very high stress to keep the boat together. We’ve managed to keep our little heavy air sails in the air and in one piece so that’s pretty good. In terms of how she is, ABN AMRO ONE is quite literally at 100 per cent and the guys deserve a lot of credit for that. But we’ve got at least another 10 days sailing, and we’ve got to keep the boat in top shape. We’re expecting a number of restarts between now and the finish and even though we’ve built up this big lead, we’re expecting to lose a lot of miles later in the leg. Any points that we get for this leg will be the most hard earned to date.” While Mike Sanderson is looking over his shoulder nervously and his navigator Stan Honey must also be finding the going tough onboard ABN AMRO ONE, life is just as tricky for Simon Fisher and the team on ABN AMRO TWO. Fisher has found that the weather information they are receiving and the actual weather that they see are two very different things. This does not make for easy times for any navigator, particularly as the ‘kids’ are currently locked in combat with the Black Pearl – a boat that they would dearly like to see behind them as they head for the first scoring gate. Simon commented recently from onboard: “The conditions have been pretty taxing. We got run over by the front and it’s been slow going. It’s been a sail change every couple of hours and not much sleep for anyone for the last couple of days. We expect to be going downwind in big breeze and getting cold and wet, the kind of conditions we have now are not what we expected but I think there is definitely light at the end of the tunnel. The weather models are getting more realistic now and we should pick up a north-westerly breeze before too long. The thing about the last few days is that every grib file was showing us weather that just wasn’t happening out here. We had to be quite creative with how we’ve interpreted the information - it’s certainly been interesting. You have to be more pragmatic, you rely more on the six-hourly skeds and watch the progress of the other boats, and then you edit the grib files to fit your situation. You look at what you’ve got and then work out what you think everyone else has got, and then moving the grib file around until it fits. We’re dragging everyone out of bed every couple of hours, but it’s actually stopped raining for the first time in two days, so everyone’s quite chirpy this morning. We also saw a whale this morning and we have been hanging out with lots of albatrosses so life is by no means dull and in many ways we can’t complain. To be honest it’s not been the full horror of being at 50 degrees south in the Indian Ocean. It’s been like a very long Fastnet Race, grey, rainy, and lots of sail changes. And now…if the weather does what it says it’s going to, then give it a day or so and we’ll be off on our way. But then who knows, anything can happen out here.” www.abnamro.com/team |
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 09 January 2006 ) |
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