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Intense start

November 17 2008

The second leg starts like the first one ended, wet, wet, wet. We are in the southern ocean again - even if only for a few days - and Oleg gets a first taste of what awaits us in the future of the race. The boat is drier now, not on the outside but at least on the inside a little bit.

Cape Town was wonderful, unfortunately too short, but very pleasant. In the end we had wonderful weather on Saturday, over ten thousand visitors at the start and many spectator boats out on the water to wave us goodbye.

Shortly before the start a southeasterly wind picked up and the fleet raced under the Code 0 up to the first buoy at Robben Island, then tacked down to the east side of the city and further to the last buoy into the wind shadow of table mountain, where the distance between the VO70’s shrank to a few boat lengths again.

Jean Yves (our weather analyst) and Wouter warned us about this calm wind area and recommended we cross the area in the west, were she is narrow. A strategy which was very successful for Swedish Match 10 years ago, but for us regrettably failed.

After we had left the area under the shadow of Table Mountain the wind picked up and we changed within one hour from the code 0 to a big genoa, later on to the J2 and finally the J4 and added a reef to the main sail. On the horizon we saw the other yachts disappearing into the night.

In False Bay I saw the sea glowing like it never did it before. It is hard to describe but it looked like hundreds of little neon tubes on every little wave in the ocean. Our keel water was a stream of light and the horizon in the south was clearly distinguished against the black sky.

Now in the west wind zone we are pretty confident to catch up with the rest of the fleet, it is important not to cause any damage on the boat but to sail very fast at the same time! As it looks at the moment, we will spend another 1500 miles at this latitude before we turn to the north.

The start of this leg was very intense and therefore I did not mange to send any report earlier. After hours on deck I hardly found the time to eat before I fell into my bunk.