In the zone…

Camper in the Volvo Ocean Race

7/10/11

I haven’t seen this sort of intensity on board CAMPER yet, despite having sailed over 10,000 miles with the crew.
To some people perhaps ‘Leg 0’ isn’t a race, just a little organized practice. Not so to this crew. The chance to finally line up against the other boats in the Volvo Ocean Race is a very serious matter especially as we hadn’t so much as laid eyes on another 2011 VO70 until we arrived in Alicante just over one week ago.

From the moment we left the dock the guys were clearly in the zone. It’s pretty obvious to see that this is the part of their job that they love and thrive on. It’s been a long road to this stage of the campaign, but now they get to do the bit that makes it all worthwhile…racing!!

CAMPER had a good start, and as Nico puts it, “We had a few good tussles going around the import part of the course, especially with Abu Dhabi.” By the time we were heading towards Tarbaca island, it was nice to look over our shoulders and see the entire fleet behind us, a sight I am sure we would never get sick of, however this isn’t an in port race and there is still a long way to go, so by all means there is no need to celebrate.” He said.

1700 GMT the man overboard exercise was like a Formula 1 pitstop. It was an unusual sight 6 VO70’ seemingly doing an impromptu waltz as the fleet suddenly stopped, dropped their sails and completed the man overboard exercise, before frantically getting back to racing hoping not to have lost any ground on the others.

Darkness drew with what seemed a blink of an eye and unfortunate for us, Telefonica Telefonica seemed to slip past with the blink of the other eye- then Abu Dhabi and then Puma. With this there wasn’t so much as a hint of worry, just continued focus to keep working back through the fleet.

A call from the ever-vigilant Salty was promising, “We just took a big chunk out of Telefonica.”
I enjoyed hearing those words.

We are now back fighting near the front of the fleet…. But really- so is everyone.

This will be a long night for the crew, not much sleep is anticipated, but hey- who wants to sleep when you are doing something you love? Not these guys.

HAMISH