BT Global Challenge - Leg 3 - 10th January 2001

Conrad Humphreys, LG FLATRON;

"I crashed out of my bunk, a little late to allow the new watch to clear the foulie locker and for me to grab ten minutes with Cian to discuss the weather and the latest position report. Up on deck, conditions were changing and watch leader Dickon was getting edgy about the 0.75 oz spinnaker which we were beginning to carry beyond its range. As skipper, I guess you never really switch off, but I’m fortunate to be able to wake and feel alert within a few moments. The spinnaker had been left without a lazy guy attached and getting it down required sending Andy out on a halyard to re-attach the guy. Remember, it's midnight, it's not blowing hard, but LG FLATRON is cranked up, fully powered doing ten knots.

The wind is due to head us and go around to the south-west and blow up to 40 kts. Once again, our weather information off the net is good and at midnight, we see the first signs of an approaching front. Changing down through all the headsails follows over the next seven hours until we are left with a deep reefed main, number three yankee and staysail. The swell is amazing, with each crest travelling at around 15-20 knots. LG just seems to love this stuff, as we crash off each crest into the following trough below. The foredeck gets a good thrashing up front, particularly during the change from the number two to three.

It’s now around 7.30 am. The watch below is eating breakfast, grabbing as many calories as possible. It’s around three degrees centigrade on deck, but with a south-westerly, the wind chill is down to minus ten. At ten minutes past eight, LG FLATRON makes a sail change for us that we didn't call. During a tack the breeze momentarily gusts up to 40 knots and as Anne winds in the sheet, she notices something is not quite right. Switching on the deck floodlight reveals my biggest nightmare to date. The staysail is the powerhouse of a cutter-rigged boat, and consequently gets hammered in a thirty thousand mile race. Ours was now in three pieces.

This was our first major sail repair, and every mile we now sailed without it was going to hurt. I set a target of 24 hours and took four people off the watch to tackle it. I calculated the loss of upwind performance might cost us around a mile per hour. Twenty four miles was as much as we could afford to give away to a fleet that after 4,500 miles had only 32 miles separating first and seventh. The first job was to get it down below to assess the damage.

The leech-line block had parted, and the sail had torn down the leech and across a mid-seam from leech to luff. Maybe 24 hours was a little optimistic. Without sewing machines on these yachts a fairly simple repair was going to take over a hundred man-hours to handsew back together - but 26 hours later, and it's back up."

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