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Global Racing Update–Bang! Crash!: The front half of the Vendee Globe fleet is in the Southern Ocean, and the carnage has begun. Daily report here. Position report here. First major casualty is Alex Thomson on Hugo Boss. This morning, in winds of 45 knots gusting to 50, the gooseneck (which connects the boom to the mast) sheared off and punctured the deck. Here’s Thomson’s description of the disaster:

“I had lots of wind, 40 knots gusting more. I was under 2 reefs, ORC and had taken down by staysail. I went below. The waves were very steep and the boat was slamming. All of a sudden I heard a big crack, the very distinctive sound of breaking carbon. My first thought was for the mast but the noise was coming from lower down. I checked down at the keel but that was ok and then I looked up and I could see daylight. The base of the gooseneck had collapsed through the deck leaving a hole 1ft by 1ft, the gooseneck half in, half out of the boat.”

Thomson is now headed for Cape Town, where he will try to find shelter to make a repair so he can stay in the race. You can hear him recount the whole incident on the Vendee Globe audio page. Even is he manages to stay in, he’s out of the running (Roland Jourdain on SILL, the former owner of Thomson’s boat had this to say: “I can’t believe that he has torn the gooseneck off. If this is the case, it means he’s really been putting the gear through the mill.” You can just here Jourdain thinking: “Rookie!”) And back in the chasing pack, Conrad Humphreys on Hellomoto also had some excitement:

“I had an awesome day, the breeze filled in and I stuck up the Code 5 and full main, pushing hard. At sunset I decided to keep the Code 5 up, the wind was topping out at 30 knots and the seaway was pretty ugly with waves breaking over the boat and hitting her side on–the pilot was doing a great job though! I went below to download the latest weather file and it showed the breeze increasing to 35-38 knots, this low had more guts in it than forecast, so I went on deck to furl the sail when suddenly the halyard snapped and the 200 square metre Code 5 dropped into the water and we ran straight over the top of it doing 20 knots. I dropped the mainsail as it was gusting 32 knots and didn’t want to rag the main, and the boat was quite unstable.

I tried to pull the top of the sail back on board as this is the only Code 5 I have, it’s invaluable, and I knew it wouldn’t break if we ran over it, it’s very strong. But pulling 200 m2 of 3.4 ounce cloth out of the water nearly broke me–it must have weighed several tons with all the water in it. HELLOMOTO was rolling all over the place in the pitch black. Twice I went over the guard rails as the sail again and again got ripped out of my hands. Miracles sometimes happen and after I had given up the fight, the sail drifted out from under the boat and was picked up by a gust and blown onboard! It then took an hour to stuff it down the fore hatch and get the genoa out and mainsail up again.”

It definitely ain’t easy out there…

Nor is it going very smoothly for Ellen and B&Q. She had to slow the boat to check out some movement of her main rudder, and she’s now about a half hour behind Francis Joyon’s pace. She couldn’t find any rudder damage, so she’s back up to speed (daily report here), sailing hard for the Cape Verde islands, and on track for an Equator crossing next Tuesday (her ninth day). Here’s a little of what Ellen had to say about the past 24 hours:

“Trying to sleep on poor B&Q who is relentlessly powering through the oceans is far from easy – this was never going to be an easy record to break. Now I think, and maybe just in the past few days, I realise what the scale of the task really is… I have felt under immense pressure since leaving – the pressure of that clock that never stops, and those minutes that never stop flowing. I’ve felt nervous, and tired, and generally pretty damn stressed since we left too.

We have had our fair share of problems since leaving ranging from leaks in the water system, to a dangerous creaking noise from the rudders. Some frighten the life out of you and others just make you realise that the list of things out here never ever stops. Each problem is just a few more grams of your energy gently sapping away…”

Hang in there, Ellen. If you want to sneak a peak anytime round the clock to see how she is doing, here’s a handy-dandy link that puts you straight through to a race viewer that has all the nav and record data. Danger: potentially addictive…



Rudder Wrongs: “Damn this thing. It’s got to last another 22,000 miles…”

Annals Of Adventure–GlobalFlyer: Uber-Wetass Steve Fossett recently notched up yet another record: the Zeppelin speed record. Okay, that’s really, really obscure, and the record speed was a thoroughly unexciting 60.4 knots. But Fossett will get ’em where and when he can. With that momentous mark now in his pocket, Fossett can turn his attention to something really big: his attempt to become the first person to fly non-stop around the globe solo and unrefueled. His ride is the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, designed and built by Burt Rutan, the man who built Voyager, the two-seater that went around the world non-stop and unrefueled in 1986, and SpaceShip One, the rocket that just claimed the Ansari X prize. The New York Times has just published an in-depth feature (free reg required) on Fossett’s latest project, and it’s full of interesting stuff. At takeoff, 83 percent of GlobalFlyer’s weight will be fuel, and the flight should last about 70 hours (Fossett will have to rely on an autopilot to get some sleep). If it all goes wrong, Fossett will have to glide back to earth (his range will be about 300 miles from cruising altitude), and just in case he runs out of fuel toward the end of the flight, the team has selected a takeoff and landing spot in Kansas (instead of Edwards Air Force Base in California) to ensure that Fossett will be over land. This is going to be a hell of a ride, and Fossett will likely take off in January. Stay tuned…



GlobalFlyer: “Uhh, Steve? I know you’re bored. But it’s probably not a good idea to light that cigar…”

Annals Of Innovation–Creature Cams: Filming wildlife ain’t easy. If the life is really wild, it spooks easily and doesn’t hang around so an army of humans, with berets, cameras, and deli trays can shoot take after take. So give max credit to English wildlife documentary producer John Downer, who decided that the only way to get up close and personal with bears, lions and elephants, was to stuff mini cameras into fake salmon, garbage cans, boulders and bamboo. Sure, the cameras get bashed around and slobbered on, but the results are spectacular, and sort of hilarious. Just check out this captivating and funny video trailer of Downer’s work with bears (in one shot you can practically count every tooth in the bear’s mouth; great soundtrack, too. Maurice Chevalier?). You can also check out Downer’s work with lions, featuring “boulder-cam,” and elephants. The ever-creative “elephant dung-cam” video takes you closer to an elephant mud bath than you’ve ever been (assuming you’d like to get close to an elephant mud bath, of course). Great stuff. The CIA or MI6 should hire this guy…



Salmon Cam: “Holy Haddock! Is this a wildlife documentary or fish-porn? And I’m not even getting my screen actors card out of it…”

Wetass Video Of The Week…: The hell with those testosterone crazed thugs on Oahu’s North Shore, whose fists are giving surfing a bad vibe. Check out this incredible video of the Aloha Classic wavesurfing competition, held last month (courtesy of SideShore media). Yes, it’s got great shots of big air, big conditions, and wild wavesurfing (there’s also a great shot (though brief) of a foil surfer). It’s also got some hilarious and heartwarming interviews about the meaning of the “Aloha Spirit.” I think they must have been handing out Ecstasy with the registration packs. The whole thing will bring a smile to your face. Guaranteed. It’s ten minutes, so make sure you watch it when you’ve got the time…



The “Aloha Spirit” In Action: “I love you, Dude!”…”Right back at ya, Bro. Now land that thing safely…”

Sailing, Sailing…: Ellen MacArthur has clawed her way back to a 2.5 hour lead over Francis Joyon. Click on this cool animation to see how she did it (B&Q is the boat that is furthest west, IDEC tucks along the coast, and the white boat is a theoretical pace marker sailing the most direct route). Overnight, the big 40-knot winds forecast kicked in and Ellen reported a wild ride: “I’ve been surfing at speeds between 16 and 32 knots! We’ve got 35 to 45 knots, and the seastate is just ****** huge…its humungous…the depression has been here for a while, so it (sea) has just built and built…occasionally we hit a wave very hard…” See the latest daily report here. Ellen’s next tactical challenge is to get past the Canary Islands, with their dangerous wind shadows. Joyon stayed well east (upwind). Ellen is trying to get west…

Meanwhile, Down South in the Vendee, King Jean Le Cam has sailed out to the front again, as Vincent Riou on PRB has taken a tactical gybe north to position himself for the next depression. Latest daily report here. Latest positions here. Riou and Le Cam are now in the Indian Ocean, which is generally considered to be the nastiest, most unforgiving leg of the course. Here’s a little racing history of the place, courtesy of the Vendee website:

“It is here, in this merciless ocean that renowned French sailor Isabelle Autissier dismasted during the Boc Challenge 94, prior to seeing the roof of her monohull wrenched open by a breaking waves like a vulgar tin opener. This is also the area where there were long hours of anguish after the consecutive capsizes of Raphaël Dinelli, Thierry Dubois and Tony Bullimore. It’s there too, more recently, that Ellen MacArthur’s maxi-catamaran Kingfisher II dismasted during the Jules Verne Trophy attempt in January 2003. By entering into this ocean, the skippers in this Vendée Globe often have just one desire: to get free of the zone without damage to find what is known as a more established Pacific swell.”

Gulp. But if you want to see why the sailors sacrifice everything to get there, go to the video page and check out the clip of SILL rocketing along that Roland Jourdain just sent in. Looks incredible. Here’s Jourdain’s description of what it’s like:

“Winter sports have started … balancing act between wanting to go fast,

and the hope to go in a straight line … big sea, last night was nice

until the (cold) front, but since the wind went up to 50 knots…had a big

wipeout…the wind then dropped a bit, but it was night time, I stayed

careful … this morning wind back up again. Fully crewed it would be fine,

alone it’s hard. Wipeout was pretty bad, I was asleep, you feel it going

… it’s too late … wiped out more than 90 degrees.”

The videos are only going to get more impressive, and more hair-raising. Hope Sill’s camera survived that last wave…



Sill At Speed: “Holy Merde! I can never get enough of this…”

RIP–Atlantic Hurricane Season Officially Closed: It was a rough one, this year. Fifteen named storms, and Tropical Storm Otto is still out there in the middle of the Atlantic, looking to get the last licks in. Next year, keep track of it all at the excellent web page of the National Hurricane Center. And now, in memoriam, the Big Daddy, aka Hurricane Ivan…



“Damn, I’m good lookin’…”

Sailing, Sailing…: With so many frigging boats at sea right now, here’s a quick rundown on what’s happening:

Vendee Globe: The two runaway leaders, Vincent Riou and King Jean Le Cam, are 300 miles in front of the chasing pack, and surfing their asses off across the Southern Ocean (position update here). Le Cam is loving it. “Impressive surfs! The boat heels right over at over 20 knots! 24, 25, 25.5 knots! That’s the record! At the top of the wave, the boat accelerates in the strong wind and hurtles down the slope at high speed. You ask yourself when it’s going to end!” And he’s only got another 10,000 miles of it ahead of him (latest daily report here). It’s tempting to say that the race for the top spot on the podium is down to just the front two, but the chasing pack (Sill, VMI, Ecover) is within 300-500 miles, there is a very long way to go (Ellen MacArthur made up almost 400 miles on leader Michel Desjoyeaux in the 2000 Vendee), and my bet is that at least one of the leading two boats will suffer a major breakdown. So stay tuned…

Ellen, Ellen, Ellen…: Way, way back, off the coast of Portugal, le Petit Anglais is fighting hard to stay up with Francis Joyon’s blistering record pace. Right now she’s about 2.5 hours behind, just completed a critical gybe to head west, and is hunkering down in expectation of strong winds of 35-40 knots (latest daily report here). The main theme so far, is just how damned hard it is for a 5 foot 5 inch, 130 pounder to manhandle a 75-foot tri. Here’s Ellen’s description of her night:

“Got the gennaker up…wind was too light for too long…I had to put it up, we were going too slowly and not deep enough…i’m f*****. Because of the strong breeze I had the sails all stacked back in the cockpit…took me 10 minutes to get the sail forward and another 35 minutes full-on doing moves lines, pulling sails up. No comparison to the monohull, its so hard. I could have it up for the last 12 hours. But of course wind has shifted now! So I will have to take it down again soon to gybe…expecting 40 knots for 6 to 8 hours…”

And only 70-plus days to go. And if you want to follow it all on a chart, here’s a cool site that is doing the plotting work for you. And a good newspaper profile…

Fedor, Fedor, Fedor…: Russian adventurer Konyukhov has already suffered light winds and technical problems (latest daily report here; position reports, courtesy of the Ocean Rowing Society, here). None of this will surprise the guest editorialist at Sailing Anarchy, who rips into the “Mad Russian,” accusing him of hype and flat-out misrepresentations. Here’s a taste of the rant, but click over to read the whole thing:

“Not only has Fedor failed to complete every single-handed long distance yacht race he entered, he created a large amount of publicity in Russia and Europe based on potentially false reports, misstatements of facts and carefully or not so carefully-worded PR releases…

First and foremost, despite his assertions, Fedor has no intentions “to break the record for the fastest single-handed non stop round the world voyage” since, according to the same PR statement, “Fedor expects to complete his journey in 120 days.” Some very slow boats in the last Vendee 2000 edition finished the nonstop round the world voyage in less time. The winning Vendee 2000 boat won the race in 93 days, which was later bettered by Francis Joyon at just over 72 days. In 1991 Christophe Augin took just over 120 days to sail from Newport to Newport with 4 stopovers on an Open 60 mono…

The mention of Francis Joyon brings our attention to another lie in Fedor’s PR statement, which says that this is “the first time that a yacht of this size [85 feet] has been sailed single-handed.” While arguably a trimaran is not a “yacht,” Joyon’s IDEC trimaran is approximately 10 feet longer than Fedor’s monohull, not to mention the 100+ foot monsters of the old single-handed Transat days…”

Ouch. Picture of the day goes to Ellen…



“Holy Sh*t! If I have to keep the hammer down like this for another two months, I’m going to look like Popeye, and the boat is going to look like that wreck from Waterworld…”

(Photo: DPPI)

Wetass Video Vault: Fishing can be a tough way to earn a living…

Just ask this Eskimo…

Or this very dedicated salmon fisherman…

BUURRRPPPP…..

Annals Of Ingratitude–Die, Dolphin!: Remember the dolphin pod that saved a group of New Zealand swimmers from a Great White shark (scroll down to last Tuesday’s posts)? Well, it looks as if no good deed goes unpunished. Two of the dolphins in the pod, may have been killed by fishermen, who hacked their tails off. There’s no way of knowing for sure whether the dead dolphins were part of the shark rescue effort, because there are hundreds of dolphins in the area. But according to local fisheries managers, one thing is sure: they were caught in illegal nets by fish poachers and mutilated.

In related news, more than 100 whales and dolphins died on a southern Australian island near Tasmania, after they swam ashore and stranded themselves. Scientists don’t know what motivated the mammals to commit suicide, but perhaps they were protesting the ill treatment of their heroic New Zealand relatives. It’s obviously tough being a dolphin Down Under these days, which means that drastic measures are called for. And here at the Wetass Chronicles, that means calling for the one, the only…PETA Pammy, the most effective animal abuse icon since St. Francis (hey, I haven’t posted this picture in more than a year)…



Calling Out The Big Guns: “I don’t know, Tim. Yes, the dolphins need me. But Fido will be heartbroken, and I haven’t squeezed into that Baywatch swimsuit in years…”

Ellen MacArthur Is Off And Running…: Solo sailing siren Ellen MacArthur cast off and went sailing Sunday. Her goal: beat the solo, non-stop round-the-world record set earlier this year by Wetass hero Francis Joyon. The time to beat–72 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes–requires massive amounts of luck (Joyon had miraculous weather) and superhuman sailing. The minimum course distance is just shy of 22,000 miles, but MacArthur’s 75-foot trimaran (Joyon’s IDEC is a 90-foot trimaran) will likely sail something closer to 26,000 miles as she plays the weather systems. The average speed she’ll have to maintain through the water is about 15.38 knots. Check out Ellen’s excellent website for all the details. It’s got lots of bells and whistles–web cams, audio, video, charts–so we’ll be following this one closely. Just over a day in, Ellen has covered more than 550 miles, and is keeping pace with Joyon. The weather scenario is unfolding as predicted, with Ellen running down the east side of a high toward Portugal, where she’ll pick up the northerly winds along the backside of a low to keep dropping toward the Equator at maximum pace. So far, the hardest thing for MacArthur (who is as competitive as they come) has been to sail conservatively and refrain from piling on maximum sail. It’s a long course, and any major breakdowns will doom the attempt, so it’s critical to protect the boat. Here’s Ellen’s latest report:

“Basically, decided not to push too hard and to be conservative…sailing with one reef and the genoa at the moment. Got a lot of sleep [ie 2.5 hours!!], don’t feel great right now, but on the whole it was necessary so that’s been quite cool. Had a bit of a drama yesterday evening just before midnight the main rudder cassette kicked up and broke two of the fuses. I heard a noise, I couldn’t work out what it was, went all over the boat couldn’t see anything and this was about 2 hours previous and then there was another noise and that’s when I saw the box had kicked up. But what I think may have actually happened was that maybe in the rough stuff at the beginning, the rudder had been hit hard enough to loosen it and actually stretched the fuses a little bit and then just as we were sailing along the stretched fuses, one bust then the other one bust. I couldn’t see any marks on the rudder and I replaced them – pain in the arse job!

On latitude of Finisterre and sailing into this depression now bit windier – all on – sea getting bigger now back into strong wind. The breeze didn’t go as light as we thought it would, average speed went down overnight quite a lot – 2 hrs at 17 knots, couple at 15 knots, bit rubbish – but now we appear to be off again.

Went through ridge of the high last night. Made a conscious decision not to put the gennaker up probably would have had it up for about six hours so decided not to go without it. You know in retrospect I could have managed but with 20 knots, gusting 23 knots and averaging 17 knots speed over ground its okay. I am in a different mindset…

Expecting wind to increase quite rapidly today and tonight.”

Joyon sent MacArthur a very sporting message, wishing her well and fair winds (but not too fair, I assume). Here are some pics of her departure…



Leaving Falmouth…



Hitting The Start Line…



Reaching Into The Bay Of Biscay…

(Photos: DPPI)