Team Sanya may be out of leg one

There is a 2m by 40mm gaping hole in the bottom of the boat says Mike Sanderson

It looks likely that Team Sanya will have to stand down from completing leg one of the Volvo Ocean Race following damage to the underside of her bow, possibly due to a collision and subsequently more major issues caused by water damage.

Mike Sanderson reported that prior to their noticing something was wrong, they had been sailing upwind in 35-38 knots of wind, and had slightly eased back the throttle in the lumpy conditions to 10.5-11.5 knot. While it was horrendously noisy on deck, as was to be excepted in those conditions, they heard a couple of bangs that they thought little about, until the crew noticed the boat adopting a bow-down trim.

"I rushed forward from the nav station and realised we had a lot of water up the front," said Sanderson. They hurriedly got those down below up and into lifejackets and nursed Team Sanya towards land at slow speed, attempting not to place any more pressure than was necessary on the bow - the door to the water tight bulkhead was closed and Sanderson said they were worried that the water sluicing through the bow compartment might destroy the water tight bulkhead. They ended up at Puerto Motril, mid-way between Almeria and Malaga on the Costa del Sol.

Now that the boat is alongside, Sanderson says that they were lucky not to have sunk. The outside of the carbon fibre laminate has peeled off over a 2.5-3m section of the underside of bow between the spray rails (the odd wedges fitted to the bow of the 2008 generation Farr designs) and possibly some of the honeycome laminate has gone as well. "Over a 2.5-3m section from our chine we have on either side in the bow, we are missing the outside laminate of the hull. In fact now that we have been able to open the watertight door, we can see a strip of about 2m long by 40mm wide straight into the sea. We were very lucky."

Sanderson believes that they may have hit something which punctured the hull and then the water pressure from the boat sailing along did the rest of the damage.

The crew are unlikely to be able to work on the boat in Puerto Motril so it seems likely that Team Sanya will have to be lifted out at the earliest possible time and taken to a boat yard where her hull can be rebuilt. One imagines that an obvious choice would be King Marine in Valencia who built the boat originally. "We didn't know whether we were going to be plucking the boat out in a 48 hour window or whether it was going to be more major. Unfortunately it is quite a lot more major than we had feared."

While it is unlikely that Team Sanya will be able to compete on the first leg of the Volvo Ocean Race, Sanderson remains bullish about getting back in the race. "It has bitten us as hard as it could have bitten us. Our goal is to get this boat on the podium a few times and get in a few people's way. And we can do that. Our goal is still very achievable. The race is on to get to the Cape Town in port race."