the worst scenario. The first leg wasn’t windy and the boats arrived without major breakdowns. The big question is what would happen if on a Cape Horn leg a boat returns to the start for repairs, two boats go to Chile suffering problems, and another goes to Uruguay… That would be a drama because I’m sure some boats won’t arrive in time for the start of the next leg. Having said that, the boats appear robust and the organisa- tion is very confident that the boats are not going to break; but especially with a one-design fleet we still have to see what happens when you really start to push… But we all hope it goes well and that there are no big setbacks. Certainly, the organisers have put in the ground work. Carlos Pich
AUSTRALIA Always a rush job…
Blue Robinson’s interview with Vestas skipper Chris Nicholson provides a little context to that disastrous grounding on Leg 2 Seahorse Magazine: What were your first thoughts when you got the green light for the Vestas programme? Chris Nicholson: Neil Cox and I had to think long and hard about this. Coxy and I were set to do the ETNZ VOR programme and when the Vestas option came up so late we had to seriously think if this was what we wanted to do. After a lot of thought we decided to go forward – so it certainly wasn’t an immediate yes. SH: Time was very tight. How long did you have to think about this with Coxy? CN: Initially we said yes, but we could have changed our minds within a three-week window. During those three weeks we were obviously scrambling as fast as we could to ensure all the pieces could come together. An example is we still had some of our wet-weather gear showing up on the morning of the race: I can also tell you the food onboard suffered through this very short lead-in time.
SH: You would have made some rapid calls to potential crew. How many times did you hear ‘no’? CN: I think just the once. Everyone we got in touch with wanted to do the race, but they had to get out of existing programmes. I couldn’t allow them to think long – but they all had to think seriously hard and change their schedule for the year. SH: So as a crew when did you all first get together? CN: On 10 August in Southampton. SH: And how match-fit was the team? CN: The young guys were in pretty good nick and the other guys had looked after themselves. Of course, we weren’t at the fitness levels leading into the last race with Camperbut, with being so late, every single area of the programme is slightly compromised. There is just no way around this and you are kidding yourself if you think you can match the others in all the areas straightaway. You can get close, but it would need extraordinary amounts of money and resources to bridge the gaps, and we didn’t have that, running as we did with the smallest shore team; in Alicante we had a shore team of three… the next smallest team had seven. SH: Had you actually sailed on a VO65 before stepping onboard Vestas... CN: Nope. I was involved in the layout discussions prior to construction but had never sailed one. So we had eight days on the ocean and five daysails before the race start. SH: The delivery and qualifier to Alicante were critical; what was the briefing as you left the UK? CN: Honestly, to learn as much as we could and get the boat safely to Alicante completing the 2,000-mile qualifier. This meant we didn’t rush the sail changes -– we took them carefully – but we did a lot of testing and pushed hard. We would test from sunrise to sunset then some nights we ran normal watches and sometimes we just shut it down and tried to sleep as the days were pretty long and intense. SH: Any early shocks…
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