Tales from the Daimler Chrysler

On board accounts from Ian Moore on Zephyrus V and Mark Denton on Team 888 PLUS the latest results

Unexpected breakages on Zephyrus

Bob McNeil's 86ft Reichel-Pugh maxi Zephyrus V was favourite for both elapsed time and handicap honours in the DaimlerChrysler Transatlantic Race. However this didn't quite go according to plan, as navigator Ian Moore explained to The Daily Sail.

"The most important thing that went wrong was that we broke the runner on the first night. We were reaching on port, in not very much breeze 15-18 knots and not really overly pressed and the runner broke - it failed in the middle."

The runner was a PBO rod (to read more about PBO standing rigging, see our interview with Future Fibre's Tom Hutchinson - who it should be pointed out didn't make the standing rigging on Zephyrus). Traditionally if these break it is usually at a fitting or at a chafe point, but this was not the case on Zephyrus. "It wasn’t in a bad place. It was somewhere where there might have been a small amount of wear, maybe where you pull the runner forward, but not somewhere where it was chafing. It just failed through structural fatigue.

"It is about a year old and it failed in such an unexpected way from cyclic loading. The sails are all Cuben fibre which doesn’t stretch very much at all so you don’t know where the load is all going and it turns out that the runners are getting loaded pretty heavily cyclically and ultimately it just failed through fatigue."

Moore says that the runner breakage threw them out of kilter. "Although we had a spare runner we spoke to the manufacturers who said that the starboard one was going to break as well, so we had to change out that. So on the very first night we almost turned back. We had to make a decision: whether to continue racing - we knew we could probably nurse the boat to the UK knowing that on starboard maybe we would have to drop the main and put the port runner on, but would we actually be able to properly continue racing?" In the end they decided that as they had spent so much time preparing for the race they'd carry on in the hope that the conditions would allow them to finish.

They replaced the port runner with the spare and fortunately had a reel of 18mm Vectran on board with which they replaced the starboard runner. "Ultimately it was strong enough, but it was so stretchy that we couldn’t control the rig fore and aft properly in a seaway on starboard tack. It was fine for running but not if you were trying to keep the forestay tight. And we didn’t want to break the forestay..."

Continuing in the race the situation with the rig caused them to alter their tactics. Most of the boats were beating upwind, trying to get around the top of an Atlantic low pressure system. On Zephyrus V they decided to bear away into the depression. Despite their rig problems at this point, it appeared that the conditions were such that they might be able to break the 24 hour monohull speed record.

"We had already seen that there was no way for us to beat round Scotland, like the rest of the boats did," says Moore. "There was a very very narrow opportunity to sail through the middle of the low and reach up the coast of Ireland and then we’d only have to beat a short way, rather than the alternative - to beat 1,500 miles in a fairly decent existing seaway which we weren’t going to be able to do." Off the Irish coast in theory the wind would be lighter conditions too in which they could sail on starboard tack.

From their position around 500 miles northeast of waypoint alpha, Zephyrus bore away into the low. Moore said that they were likely to be on port for a considerable time and if they could pop through to the other side of the low they could stand a chance of breaking the record. In the event the highest mileage they managed was 440 miles before there was more disaster.

"Gordon Maguire was asleep in his bunk and he heard the bolts sheering in the rudder bearing and he thought the rudder was going to break," says Moore. "The rudder bearing was then able to move inside the boat. Although we didn’t think the rudder bearing was going to pop out, the problem was it was damaging the bearing further and further to the point where the bearing might collapse. It was starting to leak water through the bearing because the bearing was deteriorating and moving within its housing."

Moore says they could still steer the boat, but the problem was getting worse. This combined with the runner issue was too much and they opted to retire from the DaimlerChrysler Transatlantic Race.

This is the third Reichel-Pugh designed maxi to experience rudder problems - the other two being Mike Slade's Leopard and Dennis Conner's USA-77 ACC boat, although The Daily Sail can confirm that all these incidents have occurred for distinctly different and unrelated reasons. At the time of writing Zephyrus V was waiting to be hauled out at which point the reason for the rudder bearing breakage may become clearer.

Zephyrus V will next be taking part in the Rolex Fastnet Race and the Middle Sea Race, before heading back to the States.