7 February 2012
An end to headwinds for the two leading Class40s
Shortly after midnight Monday/Tuesday, Global Ocean Race (GOR) leaders, Conrad Colman and Adrian Kuttel took their Akilaria RC2 Cessna Citation below 50S, collected their Furious Fifties Visitors’ Visa for future use in the descent to Cape Horn and tacked north-east through fog towards the southern limit of the bluQube Scoring Gate at 47S. Marco Nannini and Hugo Ramon followed suit six hours later with Financial Crisis and to the north-west, Nick Leggatt and Phillippa Hutton-Squire experienced a series of crash tacks with Phesheya-Racing and hove-to for repairs to their autopilot.
Since tacking onto starboard, Cessna Citation has been picking up speed despite some early doubts: “We may have tacked too early as the shifting winds still swing like a metronome instead of the steady breeze promised by the forecasts,” reported Colman on Tuesday morning. “Trimmed on hard for sailing upwind, our boat searches the correct course through the gathering fog like a snuffling greyhound, never tiring or complaining of condensing fog droplets the way a real helmsman would.”
Colman and Kuttel marked their ninth day at sea in Leg 3 with Colman’s fourth mast climb since leaving Wellington. “I went aloft this time to re-tie a humble elastic cord that pulls the lazy backstay against the mast and stops it from swinging perilously around the front side of the spreaders,” explains the 28 year-old Kiwi. With the backstay free to hook itself forward of the mast, the risk of winding the runner on at night, or in a hurried manoeuvre, and dismasting the Class40 was too great. “In the same way that a $100m space shuttle was scuttled by a 50 cent rubber washer, the loss of a humble bungee could cut our ambitions short,” says Colman.
An earlier mast climb to run a new staysail halyard had not gone so smoothly. With Buckley Systems and Campagne de France nearby, Colman and Kuttel decided not to reduce sail, but bore-away in 30 knots of wind to keep on the pace. “With my arms looped around the top spreaders while waiting for Adrian, the bow slammed into a wave, sending me flying with only my forearm against the spreader to stop me from being lost in space like a moonwalking astronaut,” Colman recalls. “Several similar incidents left me grateful that I regained the deck with all bones intact, but the bruises have now flowered into a multi-coloured array from blue to ochre red.”
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