Volvo Ocean Race leg 3 day 7

Team Telefónica have extended their Leg 3 lead as the fleet funnels into the worst of the Strait of Malacca where wind shifts, fishing nets and strong tidal surges create a roll of the dice every minute.

At the halfway point of the 3,051 nautical mile race to Sanya, China the fleet has expanded across 105 nm and slowed to average speeds around 10 knots in fickle winds that are causing plenty of hot and sweaty sail changes and crash-tacks.

PUMA Ocean Racing powered by BERG remain second after cutting the corner into the strait and edging CAMPER with Emirates Team New Zealand into third place, where they remained at 1400 UTC on Saturday.

With CAMPER firmly locked in their sights, fourth placed Groupama sailing team are poised for an assault on the leading pack, with Abu Dhabi 23 nm adrift in fifth and Team Sanya more than 100 nm off the lead in sixth.

Telefónica skipper Iker Martínez said the unpredictable nature of the strait meant strategy was as much about Lady Luck as good decision making.

“It’s a tricky area for sure and making choices is difficult too,’’ the Olympic gold medallist said. “Here, the decision making process is different. It’s a lot about chance. We try to get some information to help decide, but it’s a bit of a lottery. Right now we are just sailing as fast as possible.”

PUMA skipper Ken Read said his team were focused on reeling in the Spaniards, plus avoiding a collision course with the dozens of large ships and debris.

Read said his crew was alarmed at the sound of a loud bang on Friday, and surprised to find they had hit a tree.

“We crunched up a dagger board,” Read explained. “It probably saved the rudder, though, because the tree probably would have wiped out the rudder. We have a good chunk out of the dagger board now.”

The three-time Volvo Ocean Race competitor said the wind conditions were already proving challenging, but he was bracing for much worse in the middle section of the strait where it bottle-necks to just a few miles wide.

However, the fortunate fact of the strait, Read suggested, was that its unstable nature meant there were still plenty of opportunities for those hoping to steal the lead.

“It’s just a roll of the dice every minute of the day based on the breeze you have,’’ he said. “You can make a few gains, and be very happy but you have to moderate that with the understanding that nothing’s certain.”

CAMPER’s co-skipper Stu Bannatyne said his team were banking on their boat’s speed in light wind and flat water to help them claw back the lead they lost on the entry into the strait.

“The key is not to do anything radical, we just have to sail the boat the best we know how,” he said. “We know the boat is pretty fast in light air and flat water, which is probably what we’re going to get a bit of. So it’s important not to panic, not to do anything silly to stay in touch and just chip away a little bit at a time.”

Bannatyne, who raced on board Ericsson 4 during the 2008-09 race when the team dropped from first to fourth in the strait, said he held the firm belief that there was every chance CAMPER could topple PUMA and Telefónica.

“I remember vividly in the exact same stretch of water in the last race we had a pretty handy lead in Ericsson 4 and in one little slip up we got rolled by three boats on the entrance to Malacca,’’ he said. “If you get it slightly wrong there are certainly some big mileages to be gained and lost out here.”

The fleet is expected to take the best part of three days to navigate the strait, before making a sharp left hand turn into the South China Sea. The teams are expected to finish the leg at Sanya around February 5-6.

Team Sanya will receive full Leg 3 points when they finish at their homeport, as they were unable to take part in Stage 1 because of a rigging problem, while the other five teams will receive 80 per cent of the leg points.

Position Report at 13:01:37 UTC:

www.VolvoOceanRace.com

Blog from the Seas (by Amory Ross, MCM, PUMA Ocean Racing powered by BERG)

Phase One, complete. We’ve made it across the Indian Ocean and the Sea of Bengal, still in one piece and very much in the hunt. Telefónica converted on their northerly position and were first to make landfall and lead into the Strait, CAMPER close behind. We were an even closer third with Groupama an hour or so behind us. It’s been great racing, after a business week of steady ocean sailing, to have so many of us within sight of each other. This is exactly what we’re here for.

On to Phase Two: the Malacca Strait. We spent much of a wild first night avoiding squalls and growing cloud lines, and everyone was working through the early hours. Sleep was hard to find. I think we did more sail changes last night alone than we had over the 1,000 miles it took to get here. And with each sail change comes a trim change, and a trim change means moving equally as many things above deck as below it. We did manage to get around CAMPER at some point and we haven’t seen them since. That’s the way it works…and we know it all too well. You miss a cloud and it sets you back 10 miles, maybe more. It happened to us on Leg 1 and Leg 2, and it’s nice to be on the other side of the fence for a change.

It’s not getting any colder out here either. The amount of food consumed in this heat is substantially lower – nobody wants to chow hot food – and it’s almost impossible to drink enough water. One indication of the kind of bodily stress these high temps can inflict is in visible weight loss: we’ve all gone “Homie-G” with the lo-rider baggy shorts look. Thankfully, good and plentiful food is one of the greatest motivators to get wherever we’re going, so it only seems to make the boat faster!

- Amory

The unbearable lightness of the air (from Groupama)

As the fleet gradually enters deeper into the Straits of Malacca, the breeze is dying away and becoming more random, with the tidal current playing a bigger and bigger role. The next 350 miles promise to be extremely difficult to negotiate, as several windless zones are scattered about this bottleneck...

Since noon on Friday, when the six VOR-70s entered the Straits of Malacca, a twelve to eight knot ENE'ly breeze has continued to blow (veering gently to the North), but this is unlikely to carry on once the Spanish leaders approach the capital of Malaysia. Offshore of Kuala Lumpur, the gully narrows to less than fifty miles and mountains reaching over 2,000 metres serve to block the monsoon. From tonight (European time), the wind is set to drop away to less than five knots and it's very likely that conditions will alternate between squalls, torrential rain and extended periods of calm. As such the upcoming phase is likely to be the trickiest to contend with and in this game of lottery nobody knows who's going to draw the lucky number!

Fabulous landscapes

"It's an area where there isn't a lot of wind: it's very hot and very humid since we're close to the equator (2° North) and there are some tidal currents which can reach five knots, in addition to the general current generated by the monsoon and hence running against us. It'll be a tedious navigation with a great deal of shipping, pirates and lots of rubbish in the water (wood, crates, plastic, nets...). This second third of the course to China will require us to come out of this unscathed, which also means within contact of the fleet" indicated the navigator on Groupama 4, Jean-Luc Nélias.

Within the space of a few dozen miles, the sailing conditions are very different, as can be shown by the trajectory of the boat bringing up the rear: having dropped back around fifty miles, Sanya had a lot of difficulty rounding the headland of Sumatra and since then, her speed has been fluctuating at the mercy of the gusts, from less than three knots to twelve knots. And as regards strategy, its hard to get a precise idea of when to tack: within the space of few hours or even a few dozen minutes, the wind fills or eases and it was just a simple puff of air that enabled the Spanish to shake off Camper and Groupama 4, and then at daybreak, Puma... Franck Cammas and his men have managed to get back within sight of the New Zealanders, but early this Saturday afternoon they had a deficit of around twenty miles in relation to Telefonica and around ten to the Americans.

A bottleneck

"The landscape near the coast is fabulous, reminiscent of Brest's harbour area in the tropics, but we've performed a great deal of manoeuvres since we entered the Straits of Malacca: it's exhausting because you have to restack all the sails each time, which equate to nearly 2.5 tonnes! We've had to contend with headwinds and less strong currents: it's hard-going physically, especially in the heat, as it was necessary to break the sleep pattern, because everyone was needed on deck. The manoeuvres are painful, longer and the fatigue is piling up... The two leaders have got away from us a bit, but we've come back within sight of Camper, which got a bit of an edge over us when we got a few plastic bags caught around the appendages. There are a lot of things floating about in the water!" explained Charles Caudrelier.

The Indonesian night, which began at around noon European time, is making the sailing even more uncertain as it becomes impossible to pinpoint the zones with wind since the moon is barely into her first quarter and the day only lasts a dozen hours. Furthermore, the light, fluky breeze means that headsail changes have to be frequent in order to obtain a speed which has dropped to less than ten knots since the start of the weekend. At this pace, Singapore isn't likely to come into view before Monday!