Kiwis in Control...

Ed Gorman reports from Auckland on a tactically challenging start to leg four of the Volvo Ocean Race...

Given all the hoopla about the future of the Volvo Ocean Race and the fact that it is allegedly going out of fashion, the first thing to report on was the size of the spectator fleet at the Auckland re-start.

Much has been made of the fact that the re-starts and finishes of the Volvo have been under-attended, leading many pundits to conclude that the race is in a crisis of some kind and that people aren't interested in it any longer.

If Volvo's own press releases are to be believed, '45,000 people' attended the Viaduct Basin to watch the crews cast off and then, on the way out to the starting area in the Rangitoto Channel, the 'headlands were black with people'. Volvo also claimed the spectator fleet was the 'largest on-water spectator fleet seen so far' in this race.

While the first two assessments about the numbers of people are almost certainly exaggerations, the Volvo guesstimate on the spectator fleet may have been about right. But these things are very hard to judge. On the press boat from which I watched the start, local Kiwis said they thought many people, who otherwise might have come out to see the event, had gone out of town for the long Auckland Anniversary weekend.

The general feeling among the locals was that interest was down on previous years, but not hugely. Some suggested there may have been fewer boats but that there were more bigger ones with more people on them, so the total numbers of people may have been close to years gone by. All one can say for sure is that Auckland certainly turned out in force for the Volvo and that, equally, there was no sense in which the City of Sails turned its back on the race.

The start took place under cloudy skies and into a gusty northeaster with the breeze bouncing down off the sides of Rangitoto. As the eight-strong fleet gathered in the starting box just off North Head, the wind was blowing at around 17 knots and a tight reach along the North Shore lay ahead to two Volvo bouys set four miles and six miles respectively up the coast.

Kevin Shoebridge in the elegantly turned-out Tyco - arguably the best looker in the fleet - got one of the cleanest starts in clear air in the middle of the line and, by the time the boats were surfing past the northern end of Rangitoto at 12-14 knots in a sea churned up by the spectator fleet, she had edged ahead of Illbruck and Amer Sports One. That pair had earlier picked each other out in the pre-start and had set off on top of each other to leeward of Tyco at the lefthand end of the line. They were the first to fly staysails inside their jibs and both looked good from the off.

Elsewhere Neal McDonald's crew on Assa Abloy got another sluggish start while Knut Frostad on the still shocking bright pink and black apparition that is djuice, picked the Rangitoto end of the line where they sailed in heavily disturbed water and quickly slipped back.

At the first mark, Tyco led from illbruck and Amer Sports One with SEB fourth and News Corp fifth. Once past it, the boats hardened up onto the wind which had increased a little and by the second mark, off Browns Bay, Tyco was 28 seconds ahead of Amer Sports One with illbruck and SEB just a few seconds behind.

News Corp at that stage was still fifth, one minute and 25 seconds off the pace with djuice sixth and Assa seventh. The all-women crew on Amer Sports Too had already slipped back and were nearly two-and-a-half minutes behind Tyco.

The main gateway to the open sea from Auckland on this leg is the extreme northerly end of the Coromandel Peninsula, Cape Colville. But before reaching it, the Volvo crews had to beat across the Hauraki Gulf and get past the Noises Islands and Rakino and Motutapu islands, giving navigators and tacticians plenty to think about early on.

While most chose to head quite close into the islands, two boats, illbruck and News Corp, stood on up the North Shore after the second mark and set themselves up a long way left of the rest of the fleet. As the boats converged at the northern end of the Noises, this early gambit looked to have paid for Ross Field and the crew of News Corp who crossed ahead of Tyco and SEB on the right and looked to be ahead of illbruck at that stage too.

On Tyco it looked as though Britain's Tim Powell was driving. On SEB, Gunnar Krantz had the wheel while on Amer Sports One Bouwe Bekking was steering while skipper Grant Dalton enjoyed the spectacle from the weather rail. The newly-installed Amer Sports One tactician for this leg, Paul Cayard, sat on the quarter with navigator Roger Nilsson joining him intermittently.

See the following pages for photos of the start...