10th overall

Ollie Bond talks about leg 2 of the Mini Transat

After a 13th place into Salvador de Bahia at the end of the second leg, Ollie Bond finished 10th overall in the Series category of the Charente Maritime-Bahia Transat 6.50 - a very good result in a 49-strong fleet at the start of the race. His Pogo 2, Artemis covered a total of 4593 miles at 6.58 knots of average speed since leaving La Rochelle more than a month ago, and as skipper Ollie Bond puts it: “The feeling you get when you get here after having crossed the Atlantic on such as small boat is incredibly powerful.”

Of course, being a competitor above all else, the skipper of the Artemis Mini is also quick to comment on his performance, and cannot hide a certain degree of disappointment regarding his 13th place in the second leg: “I went too far east which comes down to a tactical mistake, there’s no way around it.” Fair enough, we would be tempted to say, but Ollie found himself struggling with electronic problems making weather data and positions acquisition a bit tricky. The Mini Class is very strict when it comes to the navigation apparatus allowed on board and a good old fashioned black-out is never far away in those conditions!

“Basically,” adds Bond, “it was after the Doldrums, when my instrument problems started, I stuck to my notes which were based on all the weather patterns analysis I had done ashore in preparation for the race. I was sailing a tighter angle than my rivals and, of course, I did not see them bear away and head straight for the finish line. I was on my own in the east because on paper the ideal route takes you 150 miles off Recife… It’s funny to see that Francisco Lobato (overall winner in Artemis’ class), with whom I had worked on weather analysis before the start, was also tempted by the offshore option but he quickly realised, thanks to his gear being in working order, that the theoretical models we had both studied did not apply this time!”

Still very tired when we spoke with him 48 hours after his arrival in Bahia, Bond was nevertheless making the most of those emotional moments, taking the measure of the journey: “The result is one thing, but I’d say that having made it to the finish line is a major achievement in itself. All the skippers who reached Brazil share that and it’s quite strong. Of course, on top of it I’m very happy to finish in the top 10 overall, and there have been difficult episodes: the first two days of the second leg were spent upwind, with a lot of supplies to move from side to side at each tack. I did not manage to go west enough to tackle the Canaries in an ideal place but still went through the Islands okay and dealt with light airs and weak Trade Winds pretty well. Then my main pilot started to play tricks on me… I could not use it in ‘True Wind’ mode and I had to switch to my back-up which is a less sophisticated one for the rest of the race. Soon after that, I hit something hard, I still do not know what it was but definitely not an animal, and it cracked a rudder but the damage was not major. Still it worried me and I even considered stopping in the Cape Verde Islands to repair it. At that point though, I was still at the front of the fleet and I decided against making that pit stop because it would have meant being overtaken by the bulk of the fleet.

“I pushed quite hard after that to test the rudder and make sure it would be good to go after the Cape Verde Islands, but later on that night, as I was steering under spinnaker, the rudders started to vibrate and I thought that was it: I thought my race-stopping moment had come. Luckily it was only something caught on the blade and eventually I was able to get rid of it.

"When we started struggling in the Doldrums the fleet compressed, many boats caught up because the front of the pack had parked-up. Once through the Doldrums I made a wrong choice… I relied too much on the weather models I had been studying before the start.

"However, I was too far offshore… That part of the leg had seemed more straightforward and I had concentrated more on the Doldrums and the passage through the Islands. A small mistake, but on top of that I was struggling to get accurate weather information and my position. This meant that I was unable to correct my course. I certainly learnt a lot during the race, and today that satisfaction prevails. I tried my best, spent quite a bit of time in the top five, so I’m happy.”

There is little doubt that Oliver Bond, who has been supported by Artemis this season in his Mini Transat campaign, has a bright future ahead of him.