Missing the Olympics

Ian Walker reports from on board the Green Dragon VO70 as they start their qualifier

The Green Dragon Volvo Open 70 set off for her mandatory 2000-mile Volvo Ocean Race qualification passage from her base in Cork yesterday (08/08/08). Skipper Ian Walker reports from on board.
Day 1
Location: 51 deg 21.8 N 09 deg 23.2 W

Today is sail number day - 8th of the 8th 08 and IRL 888 has set off on its 2000 mile qualifier. 888 is the luckiest Chinese number, so was deliberately chosen for this boat. Today must feel strange for our three Chinese crew members to be at sea on the day that the Beijing Olympics opens. This is especially true for Guo Chuan who had the honour of carrying the Olympic Torch into the Olympic sailing city of Qingdao three weeks ago. It feels a bit odd for me too after being so focused on the last three Olympic Games, and now having a totally different goal this year.



One of our new trial crew Jue Wang arrived at midnight last night from Valencia and within 12 hours was already heading for the ocean onboard the Green Dragon along with fellow countrymen Guo Chuan and Huang Jian and the rest of the team.

For the third time in two weeks we will soon be rounding the Fastnet Rock and then we will head north in a fairly strong weather system that is fast approaching. Our aim is to circle the depression in an anticlockwise direction as it heads east towards Ireland.

Hopefully we will round Rockall before heading north west further into the North Atlantic. With a bit of luck in five or six days we will ride the next system back to our training base in Cork. That’s the theory anyway. It would be nice to be heading south into the sun and warmth but we figured we would rather sail downwind than up, and we need to get used to being cold and wet sometime!

We are bracing ourselves for a sustained 30+ knots and the first real test of the boat in the open ocean. It is not without some trepidation that we head into this system as we can ill afford the time to our program that major damage could cost us, but as always, it is better to find these things out sooner than later. We also need the training in these conditions and it is too easy to put it off.

Right now 2000 miles seems a long way, so quite how we will feel leaving Qingdao with 12,300 miles ahead of us to Rio is hard to fathom. Still - we’ll deal with that when we get there. So all is well at the moment on board the Green Dragon but I suspect a baptism of fire lies ahead. Our thoughts are for the organisers and all those competing at the 2008 Beijing Olympics - we have five different nationalities onboard so there is plenty of pride at stake here too.

Cheers
Ian