| At sea. Volvo Ocean Race: ABN AMRO ONE will continue to lose ground due to occluded front |
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| Thursday, 13 April 2006 | |
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The boys on "ABN AMRO 1": Before the 97/98 Whitbread race started we had a video come out on the Merit campaign to date. I remember the opening line very clearly, it was like it was done by the guy who does “This is CNN" or Mufasa in the Lion King Movie, (yes I know that's the same person), anyway it started off by saying: "These are the testing times of Merit Cup". You might be asking yourself what on earth this has to do with anything, well for some reason this is a phrase that keeps springing into my mind about the previous day and the days coming up... These are going to be very testing times on ABN AMRO 1... I have been warning you for a couple of days now that we are going to lose a lot of miles as we approach a massive occluded front (stationary). Part of the reason that I have been talking about it a lot is so that both you guys and us are as mentally ready for the bad position reports as possible, but deep down inside it doesn't seem to be making it any easier. For four scheds in a row now we have lost to Movistar and we are going to continue to do so until we exit the front hopefully during the hours of darkness on Thursday night, hopefully still in the lead, but it could be very tight, even the router thinks they will get close enough for us to see them, and that's pretty hard to swallow considering yesterday they were nearly 60 miles behind and we are supposed to be trade wind sailing!!! Anyway, wouldn't swap with anyone else in the world, we are still having a dream run and we just need to keep it together. The morale on board is great, we just need to try and score as many points as possible and make sure we are in touch with the fleet when we exit the second parking lot a high pressure ridge 270 miles out from the Chesapeake entrance. At this stage it's then looking like it will be good Black Betty conditions, but still a little too far away to be totally sure. Plenty of talk now starting to be had about arriving in Baltimore, for sure as we click over the 10 day mark, people start to get pretty sick of the food and generally just being hot and sticky as the case is in this leg, so far though both the boat and the guys are in great shape. If we can get in with it all like this we will have a very happy doctor and a very happy shore crew, but there is still plenty of time yet for both to go wrong, hopefully not though. It would be nice to have a stopover where the shore crew can just be maintaining and "fluffing and buffing" the boat rather then having to fix it where we have beaten it to death..., and also so we can get straight back into the gym after a little R&R. But for now it's all about trying to extract every last inch out of the good ship, as you never know how far your nose has to be in front to get that little puff that will let us escape the clutches of this front before anyone else. Fingers crossed for us. Cheers Mike, Stan, Brad, Mark, Sid, Tony, Bob, Dave, Jan and Justin, or the boys on "ABN AMRO 1" |
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 13 April 2006 ) |
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