Out of the water in Cape Town

Ropes through rudders, blown off fairings revealed as the VO70 boats are lifted

One of the oddest sights on offer in Cape Town this week as the Volvo Open 70s have been coming out of the water has been Ericsson's rudder. This currently has a piece of spinnaker sheet stuck through the middle of it, the rope having neatly sawed its way through the non-structural trailing edge of the foil around 200mm down from the top, .

This unusual piece of damage occurred on the breezy first night when their A3 spinnaker dropped over the side possibly due to a broken halyard and the boat ran over it. Jason Carrington explains: "One of the sheets got wrapped around the rudder and the keel and because it is such a tight rule on how many sails you can have, we were pretty desperate to get the sail back on board so we wrestled a lot with getting it back on and I think that was when we damaged the rudder."