Ramping it up

ABN AMRO II's navigator Simon Fisher updates on progress with the 'youth' team

It has been a pretty interesting and varied few months since joining ABN AMRO in February in Rotterdam. We got the core of our team together and starting sailing with the crew of the other boat. This began with a trip aboard the ABN AMRO Volvo Open 70 from Rotterdam to our base in Portugal which gave us a little taster of what was to come: for sure these boats are going to be a handful, not to mention still a fairly unknown quantity at this stage with a lot to be learnt about getting the most efficient sail inventory, optimising yourself in the right corner of the rule and working out what is the best way for 10 blokes to haul a big angry boat around the race course.

Training in our base in Portimao, POR, gave the core of our Team - myself (Navigator), Seb Josse (Skipper), Scott Beavis and Nick Bice (Watch Captains) time to lay some plans down for our training schedule for the period before we get our hands on our own 70 in July plus work with ABN AMRO's other crew learning the boat's systems and issues that surround getting a new race boat up to speed. We also had the benefit of overseeing the final part of the trials for the remainder of our crew and get an idea of who we were going to be spending the next 18 months working with. With the trials completed and the 70 tuned up and ready for a transatlantic we had to wave the yacht off from the dock and turned our efforts to getting the Pindar Open 60 up to speed for the forthcoming Calais Round Britain Race (part of the IMOCA circuit). Sadly this ended a bit prematurely for us having blown out one of our key upwind sails shortly followed by the tack fitting leaving us without a jib for what was lining up to be a predominantly upwind race. Despite being pretty disappointed I guess the silver lining was that we were able to join the rest of the Team who were now assembled in Portimao with the old Tyco VO60.

For the last couple of weeks the boys have be working hard at getting the 60 back to a state of race readiness for the forthcoming Route de l'Equateur, a French run race from Marseille down to Point Noire in the French Congo. It is a pretty unusual race course, with one of the more unlikely destinations for a yacht race, but with a good fleet of VOR60s of varied vintages it should make for a good race. For us it will be the perfect opportunity to do some proper race practice and work out how our team fits together. We'll be spending 20+ days at sea which will give us a good period of time to figure out how to work together as efficiently as possible and figure out where our strengths and weaknesses lie.

There is a really great mixture of talent on board the boat with a pretty diverse mixture of sailing experience so it will be interesting to see how it all comes together offshore. We have spent the last seven days racing together and with only a few hours under our belt things are looking pretty positive so far. All the boat handling is coming together nicely, as an aftergaurd we are building a good working relationship and the trimmers are also developing a good loop of communication to get the best out of the 60.

Everyone is pretty ramped up for the race - 4,600 miles later we should have a pretty good idea of where we are at. After a few days in Congo we are then off to Brazil for Ilha Bella race week - part marketing exercise, part inshore practice while we get looked after by Banco Real the Brazilian wing of ABN. It seems strange to train for a race in open class boats in a slightly dated IMS 50 but again it will be a good way to grow as a team, do some good racing in a nice destination and slide back a few caiprihna's before starting the hard graft when we get our hands on the Volvo 70 in July.