Nissan Turbo

Calamity befalls several competitors in the latest session of the Archipelago Raid

The second day of the Archipelago Raid begun today with a dismasting, near sinking and several broken boats. But overall the competition is hotting up as the wind, and landscape, gives competitors an action packed second day on the water.

Despite two general recalls at the beginning of the day the fleet finally left in the early hours of this morning heading South to Huvudskar before turning north again towards Sandhamn. As the sun came up and the wind filled in it was the Nissan teams that took an early lead at checkpoint one - all three of the leading places were Nissan boats, the French led from the Germans and then the Swedish.

At checkpoint two the three Nissan teams were still leading, but by the one hour checkpoint, on the picturesque island of Sandhamn (where they say 'the sea meets the horizon') the leaderboard was changing. While the French Nissan team was still ahead, it was the F18 European Champions of the Dutch Yamaha Red team that came in second and Team Catella (SWE) in third.

But the stories from this first day of real action were not of the front-runners, but those that had experienced exactly what the Archipelago Raid is famous for - the extreme and unique waters of the region. It was before the working day had even begun that White Knuckles Express hit a submerged log and started taking on water. By 9.30am the team and the boat were safe but for the Swedish crew of Fredrik Karlssen and Magnus Groth it was seemingly the end of their 2007 Archipelago Raid. However in the spirit of the Raid and the desire to finish the event they have since found another boat and plan to re-join the fleet in Fejan this evening.

Fredrick Karlssen (SWE) from White Knuckles Express commented: "We have everything in place now for the boat, we have been lent Magnus Woxén’s boat (who was the 2006 Archipelago Raid winner) and we will now tow it to Fejan. The one thing we don’t have organised is that we only have one daggerboard so we are working on finding another one right now but we plan to re-join the fleet this evening."

Voltaren, another Swedish team, dismasted at 10.45am this morning and are also fighting to remain in the event and are currently fixing the rigging issue that caused the mast to come down. They are planning on sailing to Fejan this afternoon.

As the remaining teams arrived at the Sandhamn checkpoint the stories were of damaged boats but of a great mornings sailing. Ryan Crawford from Team Blue Ocean (UK) described what happened to them: "We were sailing along in an area where we were not too worried about rocks, about 500 yards from each shore, when suddenly we heard a big split and half of the daggerboard floating away behind us - it had just been cut clean away under the boat. We had hit the same object as the White Knuckles team but they had come off a lot worse than us…"

Fredrik Ekman (SWE) commented on the leg into Sandhamn: "It was a tight reach for us into here and we had a few problems keeping the bearing which meant sailing deep with the gennekar up. We are now looking at a bit of a paddle on the next leg through a narrow channel at the next checkpoint but we have a bit of practise with the paddling now as we paddled into the finish last night and despite hitting the bottom we still managed to win!!"

Team BEP Marine (NZL) who had a tough morning said: "We blew out the genniker just after the start and lost the halyard so we stopped when we could to get the halyard back which meant we lost a lot of time to the others. But we came here for this, it is fantastic conditions and great sailing – we are hanging in there."

The teams will navigate a number of further checkpoints throughout the day and tonight will finish on the island of Fejan in the Northern end of the Swedish Archipelago having sailed around 80 nautical miles today.

Results:

There are five legs with around 5 – 7 checkpoints at each leg. The results are based on a points system determined by the arrival position of each leg: The first team of a leg will get “the number of teams who start the leg” + 3 points. For example 15 competitors to start the leg + 3 = 18 pts, the second team would get 17, the third 16 etc. A bonus of 0.5 points will be given to the first team to each checkpoint

NB Below are the positions of the 10 first boats after Leg 1/Day 1 ONLY and do not include any checkpoints from day 2:

1. Sundvalls Bygg AB (Ekman/Tempelman) 31.5
2. St Jude Medical (Grape/Gnosspelius) 31
3. Nissan Hobiecat FRA (Mourniac/Citeau) 29
4. GB Glace (Nissar/Schiratzki) 28
5. Wippies (Karto/Öhman) 27
6. Team Thule (Strandberg/ Almstedt) 26
7. Catella Racing Team (Johanson/Gahmberg) 25
8. Nissan Hobicat SWE (Kjerstadius/Tempelman) 24
9. Nissan Hobicat GER (Gosche/Walther) 23
10. White Knuckle Express (Karlsson/Groth) 2