Second home

Puma arrives in Cape Town

At 19:44 local (17:44 GMT) Puma crossed the finish line to take second place in the first leg of the Volvo Ocean. After 23 days at sea and a tough 6,500 nautical miles, skipper Ken Read and his crew were welcomed by crowds of thousands at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa.

Sailing their final few miles through Table Bay as the sun was setting, Puma’s il mostro was greeted with fireworks and champagne on the dock. The 11 crew stepped onto terra firma for the first time since the Volvo Ocean Race start in Spain a month ago, thrilled to be reunited with their families.

Having spent much of the leg locked in a match race with Ericsson 4, Puma sailed a solid leg. Skipper Ken Read was pleased with their performance, meanwhile conscious that this is a ten leg race and there’s a long way to go yet.

“Seeing that there was no such thing as Puma Ocean Racing just over a year and a half ago, second place is great. I am very proud of our sailors and our team as a whole, from the boat builders and the design team, to the office staff. Getting here is pretty emotional, arriving here and seeing the family, a really nice welcome by Cape Town,” said Read. “We’re very, very happy with our first leg and it’s a big relief to be here, knowing we have a great boat. I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights over the last year imagining what 37,000 miles of sailing round the world on a slow boat would be like. And we don’t have a slow boat. So now we’re in a boat race. And we’re good at boat racing. The guys on this boat were chosen because we’re good at it. So in this race, don’t count out the Puma il mostro team, that’s for sure.

“We had a few little issues; we had our primary water maker go down off Brazil - that was a little nerve-wracking. We actually talked about going into Brazil for a while, but Casey, using a bilge pump, put together a new water maker. We had a couple of little hydraulic problems, keel issues, but structurally, we think, the boats in good shape. We felt we were pushing hard, but clearly we have another gear shift we have to go to be up there with Ericsson 4. And we’re not going to stop until we find it.”

"I am so proud of our design team and our build team for putting together the boat. Honestly, I think all the guys on our boat have never pushed a boat that hard before.
Hats off to the Ericsson guys. They showed us clearly that there is might be another level that we need to get to. But, that said, I’ve never gone airborne off the waves before and lived to tell the tale. It’s quite a comforting feeling, from here on, knowing how hard you can push. Now we can sit down as a group and figure out where that next speed button is. We are pretty comfortable with where we are at.

"I thought we paced ourselves pretty well. It’s pretty rare that we had to get guys completely out of their sleeping patterns. A couple of guys got pretty taxed in the windy stuff, because we were down to a smaller group of drivers. I think right now, most people are pretty refreshed. We are ready to go tomorrow."

Navigator Andrew Cape added: "I haven’t sailed into Cape Town for 11 years, it’s a great place to arrive. It was a good leg all-in all. Happiness all round. There were bad conditions and most people got through it well. It’s a good sign. We still had a lot of light air in the Med, then the running and then a lot of reaching and then the hard stuff getting here, so it was mixed bag. Because we haven’t two boat tested against a new boat, we were learning all the time. We’ve learnt a lot and I’m very happy with what we have learnt and where we ended up here.

"Ericsson 4 did a good job to sail through us when it was windy, but we were finding our own way there, and we were happy with what we were doing. I guess we were second best, but all-in-all, happy."