Assa poor show

Ed Gorman looks at why one of the most potent Volvo boats finished fifth

We keep going back to Trindade - the island off the Brazilian coast. The reason all roads lead there is because, for the top-five boats in the first leg of the Volvo Ocean Race, it was the key moment.

For Assa Abloy it was the moment they got absolutely stuffed. Can you imagine being just two hours behind the leader Illbruck coming up to the island and then see them finishing the race, 2,000 miles later, more than 700 miles ahead?

That's a distance equal to more than a Fastnet, as crewman Jason Carrington pointed out in one of the last e-mails from the boat prior to her finally putting her bow into the harbour at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront on a thundery and wet Sunday morning.

Assa had it all going for her - she was fast, they were sailing smart and she looked to be on course to fulfil all the pre-start hopes for her. A solid second or even a win was definitely on the cards but in Cape Town four boats were already hauled out with their masts unstepped by the time she got there.

There were lots of great quotes and descriptions from Roy Heiner's crew but the man himself perhaps summed it up best when he talked of how he and co-skipper and navigator Mark Rudiger desperately fought to get south (where the pressure was) but just had no chance because there was so little wind. "The rich were getting richer," he said, "and for 10 days we read the position sched to the boys and there was absolute silence."

Rudiger gave a fascinating account of how he and Heiner came to that fateful decision to head hard east initially after the island, where they were hung out to dry, while boats behind them which went east and then managed to bail out to the south, got away. The technique he and Heiner use is to "race" each other at the navigation station when they confront a key choice.

Heiner looks at the data and makes his mind up while Rudi looks at the same information and comes to his conclusions. Then they discuss it and decide which of them is going to get Assa down the track quickest. On this occasion Heiner wanted the south but Rudi was persuasive that the east was a better call, at least initially. To his eternal regret Rudi won the day and then spent the rest of the leg wishing Heiner had talked him out of it.