I heard that Xabi (Fernandez), their skipper, is an ex-biking champion and, as we say in France about biking, MAPFRE is “sucking our wheel,” following all our moves and waiting for an opportunity to attack
Hello everyone:
After nine days of racing and more than 3,000 miles I am starting to hate the red boat of our Spanish friends.
I heard that Xabi (Fernandez), their skipper, is an ex-biking champion and, as we say in France about biking, MAPFRE is “sucking our wheel,” following all our moves and waiting for an opportunity to attack.
Since we have been sailing around the Ice Exclusion Zone, this leg has turned into a match race and we probably gybed more than 30 times yesterday to stay along the ice limit and to have more wind.
That’s a nightmare for the crew - gybing every hour for 30 hours means no sleep and gybing requires a lot of work on the boat, moving all weight from one side to the other.
More than 400kg inside the boat and four sails - four sails of 100 kg each when they are dry but when they are full of water they probably each weigh 50kg more.
Gybing every hour also means you can’t take off your foul weather gear to sleep and you feel more and more wet and after this session all the team was exhausted.
MAPFRE made a good comeback with the wind and with very good speed. Over 24 hours we saw them slowly catching us up and putting pressure on us and we have been working hard to find a solution to match their speed. During this period we have tested many solutions…
That’s always a difficult situation; you don’t have the speed so you change lots of things, modify all your habits and you can easily become lost.
And then MAPFRE passed us. So we decided to go back to our boat trim reference numbers and our speed improved and with two good moves we overtook him and now he is six miles behind us.
That’s nothing when looking at the next six days that it will take us to reach the finishing line, especially when there are so many routing choices to make. Even Vestas and Team Brunel can make a comeback.
People often ask me which will be the toughest leg of this race. I always answer that the forecast will decide. You can have an easy Southern Ocean leg and a terrible one in the Tropics (like the next two legs).
But today I hope that this one will turn out to have been be the toughest…
Charles
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Hi all,
What a battle we are having with our Chinese friends of Dongfeng! I should say is good fun but it is being quite hard to be honest.
As most of you would see we have done more than 30 gybes in around 24 hours – you can imagine not much sleep has been going on board. More than that, we had the ice limit to gybe on so we couldn’t do any mistakes on those gybes and enter the zone so it has been full on.
Right now we are in a drag race heading ENE, making a lot of nm towards Melbourne which feels good and we have Dongfeng ahead of us. They are gaining a bit, slowly but the mileage is going up and we are scratching our heads to keep the distance down and wait for our opportunity.
2300 nm to go and plenty of action so we keep with the morale high as we feel we are doing a very good leg.
We keep stretching in the boats behind so that is good too.
Priorities on board are to have as much rest as possible when off watch so we can be in better form for the action coming.
We will keep you updated.
Cheers
Xabi
