All hands to the pumps

Saturday 23 May 2009, 10:00 GMT

By Mark Chisnell

THE TEN ZULU REPORT, LEG 7, DAY 8

After a night of StealthPlay-induced darkness everyone emerged blinking into the light this morning. And it’s all hands to the pumps, as Ian Walker just told us from Green Dragon, “We are running extra people on deck and putting every last drop of energy into the last miles to the finish.”

There were 80 of your finest nautical miles between Ericsson 4 to the north and Telefonica Black to the south, with the rest of the fleet spread between them, and just over 300 miles to run to Galway. Leverage with a capital L – now that’s what I call a boat race.

It was all about the wind shift overnight, and that one final, crucial gybe, a right-turn to head east towards Galway. They (almost) all hit the StealthPlay button to hide their strategy from everyone else, and it left the navigators to make their best call from reading the tea leaves and the weather maps. Opinions, it has to be said, differed.

At 10:00 ZULU, everyone had the accelerator pressed through the floor in a 20 knot south-westerly breeze – fresh, but no longer frightening. Ericsson 4 had taken a firm grip of the Leaderboard, with an advantage of over 30 miles from PUMA and Green Dragon, who were neck-and-neck to her south. It’s a titanic struggle for that second place, less than 20 miles separating the boats all the way back to fifth – I know who they’ll be cheering on in Galway ...

There’s no question that PUMA are fully back in the game. Ken Read gave some more detail in his audio interview with Amanda Blackley about the broken rudder. “It wasn’t strong enough, we didn’t hit anything,” said Read.

And there was a great Rick Deppe .tv clip showing the wipe-out and the aftermath. It included some footage of a new rudder being put in, not so much a repair as a replacement.

What I didn’t realize yesterday was that they broke the port rudder while they were on starboard gybe, before the cold front went over them. So they had to gybe anyway, at the same time as the breakage on Thursday evening. And that meant that they were sailing all day yesterday using the other, perfectly good, starboard rudder on port gybe – not such a surprise that they were going all right, then.

Any further problem would have come after they had to gybe back to starboard overnight to get to Galway. But the new rudder they were putting into the boat in the .tv clip looked as good as new to me, and they’ve been going just fine overnight (and hopefully that answers Neville Barltrop’s question from yesterday’s Afternoon Report Comments).

The fact that the breeze has eased overnight will certainly reduce the load on the rudder, and on some grateful crews. Ericsson 4’s Media Crew, Guy Salter reported a broken harness tether in his audio interview with Amanda Blackley. I don’t want to think about the forces that the body wearing it was subject to when it snapped.

The change in conditions might also brighten the prospects for the Telefonica boats - Roger Nilson was as gloomy as ever about their breezy downwind speed in this audio interview yesterday. But it does make you realize what a fantastic job Bouwe Bekking and his boys were doing to hang on to the pack with Telefonica Blue.

So much for the sailing, what about the strategy? The boys on Green Dragon nailed it yesterday when they told the Virtual Gamers, “The big decision today is when to gybe for Galway.” It’s all down to the movement of the low pressure system that the fleet has been riding with since Thursday – as described in today’s analysis from Race Forecaster, Jennifer Lilly.

As the low moved away to the north-east, and a new one started to approach from the south-west, the breeze started to back (rotate anti-clockwise) from the west to the south-west, and drop. The timing of the wind shift can be seen in this graph of True Wind Direction (TWD) and True Wind Speed (TWS).

The wind shift forced the boats to gybe from port in the westerly, to starboard in the south-westerly to maintain their course to Galway. Green Dragon’s follow up question to the Gamers was whether or not they should use the StealthPlay to hide their gybe. The answer was yes, and the skippers and navigators on the real boats agreed.

Ericsson 3 was the first boat to hit the Stealth button, disappearing from our screens at 13:00 ZULU yesterday, followed by Ericsson 4 and PUMA at 16:00, with Telefonica Blue, Green Dragon and Delta Lloyd following them into hiding at 19:00 ZULU. Only Telefonica Black hasn’t used the StealthPlay.

Leading the way north-east, it was no surprise to see that Ericsson 4 had gybed first, just after 20:10 ZULU. Green Dragon was next at 21:30 ZULU, then PUMA, Delta Lloyd, Ericsson 3 and Telefonica Black (the wind shift and gybe described by Roger Nilson) all followed between 23:00 ZULU and midnight, leaving Telefonica Blue the last to go just after 01:00 ZULU this morning.

It looks like the wind direction (TWD) that triggered the gybe for almost all the navigators was about 250 degrees, with two exceptions. Green Dragon went a little earlier in the wind shift with the breeze at 270, and Telefonica Blue left it a little later, until the wind was 235.

Just as Telefonica Blue gybed, the 01:00 ZULU Position Report came out and the first boat re-emerged from StealthPlay, Ericsson 3. She was followed at 04:00 ZULU by Ericsson 4 and PUMA, then the rest at 07:00 ZULU. So this morning we can see everyone in the Race Viewer again, top to bottom from Ericsson 4 in the north, then Ericsson 3, Telefonica Blue and Green Dragon, Delta Lloyd and PUMA and finally Telefonica Black in the south.

The Distance to the Leader (DTL) hasn’t been much help while they were all sailing north-east, but from the 01:00 ZULU Position Report onwards everyone was pointing at the finish and converging fast, and it’s been all about the Leaderboard ever since. If you check out the DTL graph, you can see how the gybe reshuffled the pack, with Ericsson 4 coming through to take control and building their lead from there – just as the Predicted Data said they would yesterday.

So, how might it play out from here? In her weather forecast, Jennifer Lilly thought the fleet would arrive in Galway ahead of the surge of southerly wind arriving with the new low pressure. And if we look at today’s Predicted Route image we can see the fleet arriving in Galway in the early hours of Sunday morning with that southerly pulse right behind them.

The later the arrival of the new wind, the better off the boats in the north will be, as they have a faster sailing angle (TWA) to the finish. So Ericsson 4 look pretty comfortable, but the rest of the podium is too tight to call, with the Predicted Arrival (ARRIVAL) times for PUMA, Green Dragon and Delta Lloyd spanning just 11 minutes on Sunday morning. And as Wouter Verbraak told us from Delta Lloyd this morning, the weather was squally. Those 11 minutes could disappear in one unnecessary or slightly iffy sail change.

Some very long TEN ZULU’s in the last couple of days, but space for some Comments this morning. Erwin Eazenberg asked about the 2D Race Viewer showing the boats in the ice exclusion zone. We covered this in the TEN ZULU when it happened, and this link will take you to the image of the Race Management system showing them clear of the zone. In short, it was a plotting error in the 2D Race Viewer, due, I suspect, to the difficulties of map projection at high latitudes.

And finally, it was Ken Read’s turn to have a pop at the StealthPlay – PUMA’s skipper writing an email on the whys and wherefores just before he hit the cloak button. Like those that have written from the boats on this topic previously, Read was generally negative about it, and I don’t blame him. It adds extra uncertainty, just when the sailors need certainty most. But equally, I don’t believe we’d have anything like as exciting a finish to this leg without it.

It links to yesterday’s Comments topic of how often Race Management should release Position Reports to get the most entertaining racing. And dylan wondered if we could display more position updates to the viewers, but keep the locations secret from the fleet. This would be the Holy Grail – allowing both the best Position Report timing for open racing, and constant public updates for the best viewing.

As Read noted, “As a fan I think I would want to see what was happening at this critical juncture.” But not, perhaps, at the expense of the fleet always sailing around in a tight pack. Unfortunately, in this technological age, I very much doubt that the rule against outside assistance could be effectively policed. Of course, you could junk that rule to allow outside weather routing assistance, as Bouwe Bekking suggested in an email on the last leg. But that’s a whole other can of worms ...

It’s a straight drag race to the line so we’ll be ending the TEN ZULU here for this leg, and handing you over to the arrivals team in Galway for the overnight finish. I’ll be back with the Leg 8 Preview, but join us next weekend for full audio and .tv coverage of the Galway in-port racing. Can Green Dragon beat the home town jinx that dogged Ericsson 4 in Rio, and PUMA in Boston?

The TEN ZULU REPORT (so called because it follows the 10:00 GMT fleet position report, and Zulu is the meteorologist's name for GMT).

Welcome to the TEN ZULU Comments Section.

I’ve had my say, now this is where you get to have yours - we want to hear your opinion on who’s fastest, who’s smartest and who’s just plain lucky. But it is fully moderated (so bad language, personal abuse, repetition etc won’t be accepted), and sometimes it might take a while for your words to get cleared - don’t expect them to appear instantly, but we’ll get there eventually ...

www.markchisnell.com

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