VOLVO HOTSEAT

Let's look at the numbers

2009-10-07T06:52:00.004+01:00

The Volvo Ocean Race is a great place to dig into the numbers that show that sailing does, indeed, deliver for sponsors. It has a global reach that is incredibly unique in the sponsorship marketplace due to its 9 month duration and its physical touch points in most of the worlds major markets.

The preliminary numbers from the first half of the 2008-9 VOR are outstanding, both in their absolute size and also in their growth from the 2005-6 race.

In the first 5 months of the race, 2.41 million unique visitors visited volvooceanrace.org, up 39% for the same period in 2005-6.
In the first 5 stopovers, the total number of spectators to pass through the turnstyles of the race village was 2,350,392. This is a 250% increase over the first 5 stopovers of the 2005-6 race
The pro-am race day in Alicante brought 68,400 people to the village, while the total stopover attendance was 937,000 people.
Cochin India, by comparison, brought in a total of 811,677 people with a peak day attendance of 107,289. Yup over one hundred thousand people in the race village on a single day. You'd have to see it to believe it....From being there I can assure you that it was absolutely amazing.

Unfortunately we don't have data from the individual teams that participated in 2008-9 quite yet. However, we will look at two examples from 2005-6 to set a base line; Ericsson and ABN Amro. Here are some very top line results their sponsorships in 2005-6;

Ericsson 2005-6:

Estimated their media value benefit at US$ 65 Million.
Put on 500 B2B focused events where they entertained 4,600 decision making customers at the Executive, VP, and Senior level.
Engaged employees through over 100 seminars and workshops focused around the race.
Estimate their total value of sponsorship at close to US$100 Million, which is a 450-500% ROI.

ABN Amro:

Estimated their media value benefit at US$ 77 Million.
Entertained 35,000 key customers and clients worldwide
Engaged employees and developed corporate pride as demonstrated by the 25 Million intranet hits that their employees generated on the team's website.
Measured their tangible total economic return on investment at 600%

It's time to sell the sponsorship

2009-10-01T21:45:00.009+01:00

The key to a selling a sponsorship proposal is the in-depth focus on designing activation programs for the sponsor. Before going into talk to a sponsorship opportunity I research everything that there is to know about the company that I’m presenting to. I read every annual report, SEC filing, analyst call, and executive interview that I can get my hands on. I study the strategies of their competitors as well. If they are growing into a new market, then I design it into the activation. If they are having employee retention or recruiting problems then I design the solution into the activation. Launching a new product? Want to demonstrate a technology? Purchasing a company? Launching a philanthropy project? Need a voice for a PR campaign? Redefining their brand? Whatever and where-ever the company wants to go I build the platform to catalyze their core business goals and relate it all to the property attributes of the sailing team. The sailing project is not the focus of the presentation; it is, instead, the base that the entire business case is built upon. It is also critical to show the sponsor that their investment’s returns will be both measurable and also be independent of the sporting outcome of the races. Ericsson Racing's VOR 2005-6 project is the perfect example of a measurable activation strategy, that was wildly successful, even though the sailing team was, arguably, not.

Think that putting a pitch presentation together sounds like a lot of work? Well... it is. Mainly because every pitch must be fully customized for every audience. This is why properly managing the sales cycle can help this process. Leads are fairly easy to generate. We all know people that know people. And there are always cold calls that can fill the pipe line with leads. However, the key is to properly qualify each of our leads into realistic opportunities. Opportunities are the leads where the where the activation case is strong once vetted through the qualification process. It is in the preparation for the selling stage where the research and creative planning happens.

We have a big job ahead of us. It is critical that we make sure that the sailing fan base has an accessible and entertaining America’s Cup 34 and Volvo Ocean Race in 2011-12 to enjoy. Hopefully we all can, collectively, light the imaginations of sponsors to join us as we transform the commercialized and entertainment side of our sport.

Again please leave your comments and questions for me to reply to. I've enjoyed reading and responding to all of the comments so far.... Also stand by for case studies in the next blog posts.

-Matt out
37 48.0N
122 26.6W

Creating real value for sailing's sponsors

2009-09-29T19:43:00.008+01:00

To start off the second posting in this series, I want to quickly discuss the partners that make up a Volvo Ocean Race or America’s Cup team:

The Sponsor: The sponsor is the end customer. The sponsor’s key competence is aligned with their core business, whether it be manufacturing cars, writing software, consulting businesses, banking or designing handbags. The sponsor makes decisions on building new factories, hiring employees or launching marketing programs, based on that project’s investment yielding a positive Net Present Value (NPV).

The Activator: This is typically an events agency such as Momentum, Octagon, or IMG. They work for the sponsor to build all of the auxiliary activities upon the sailing property platform.

The Property: This is the sailing team. It provides the base for the activator to build a positive NPV business development program targeted at the sponsor’s core business. The end goal of the sailing team is to manage the sporting operations, while supporting the activator’s plan.

I’ve read a lot of team sponsorship proposals over the past 5 years: Volvo Ocean Race, America’s Cup, World Match Racing Tour, European IRC, and Med Cup teams... Most sponsorship proposals lose sight of, both, the customer and the product. When I read most sponsorship proposals, generally, my first thought is ‘Hey, I’d love to sail for this team. This is going to be fun.’ The proposals talk about the race, adventure, prestige, competition, sailing team members and the program’s management structure - all of the key elements to winning a sail boat race. While this type of presentation does have a place in the sales cycle, it does not focus the product to the customer. The product that we are selling is a platform for corporations to leverage their core business goals.

Remember, we are selling the activation plan, and not the sailing team. The reason for this is straight forward; If a sponsor only financed the sailing property and did not make a further investment into activation, they would, most likely, just barely recover their costs of the property's sponsorship cost. However when the property is coupled with a sophisticated activation program, then 2 things happen; Not only is the activation the source of the most significant returns on investment, but also, the activation, through network effects, brings more attention to the sporting property, thus increasing the returns that the sporting team generates. The following illustration gives a basic insight to this principle.

Since we've examined the marketplace (in part 1), understand how commercialized sailing projects are structured, how sponsors financially justify their investments, and where the real value is generated we are now ready to look at the sell cycle....stay tuned for part 3 of this series.

Thanks for posting questions and comments, I'll continue to post responses.

-Matt out
37 48.0N
122 26.6W

Filling the Sponsorship Pipeline

2009-09-25T18:48:00.014+01:00

I’ve decided to kick off a multi-part series of posts on the ‘Commercialization and Business of Professional Sailing’ as a bit of a change from my typical ‘Life from the Nav. Station’ pieces. This has been a personal interest of mine for some time, but seems particularly timely given where we are with the VOR and America’s Cup timelines. In this first part I will establish a baseline for where 'we' are in the global sponsorship market place.

Let's dig in...
With the start of next Volvo Ocean Race two years away and the America’s Cup/Louis Vuitton Series, ostensibly, returning to life, we sailors are asking: “Who’s going to be on the starting line”. While some of the teams will be underwritten by wealthy ‘hobbyists’, both the Volvo Ocean Race and the America’s Cup have their eye on the commercialized sports level where F1 and NASCAR currently reside.

What does this mean?
There are a lot of corporate sponsorships that will need to be sold in the next 12-24 months. Consider that an America’s Cup team will spend at least $20 million, and a Volvo Ocean Race team spends about $8 million annually. With an idealistic, 12 AC and 12 VOR teams, there is at least a $336 million annual pipeline that must be filled to sustain each event. To add some perspective on what $336 million represents in the advertising industry, in 2008 $918 billion was spent globally on all forms of advertising; $16.8 billion was spent on sponsorships, and 69% ($11.6 billion) of those sponsorships were allocated to sports (IEG Sponsorship Report)Thus the America’s Cup and the Volvo Ocean Race teams should represent a 2.9% market share of global sports sponsorship.

By way of comparing the VOR or AC to other sponsorship properties:

The title sponsorship of a week long PGA event has a price tag of $15 million.
A full year (38 race) title sponsorship of a NASCAR team costs $18 million.
Each ‘Gold Level’ sponsor of the 2008 Beijing Olympics spent $100 million.
A top tier Formula1 team’s annual operating budget in 2008 was $400 million.

If you consider that, practically, none of the AC or VOR teams have financial commitments from commercial sponsors at this point in time, we have a long-long ways to go to reestablish professional sailing’s stake in the global sponsorship market. In the second post in this series, I will discuss (what I see as) the make up of a successfully commercialized sailing project. Please post comments and questions. I will post responses to each of them.

-Matt out
37 48.0N
122 26.6W

Starry Starry Night

2009-07-13T08:44:00.001+01:00

The sun has set, and the moon has not yet risen.

After a week of sailing across the Pacific Ocean we, finally, have a cloudless night. The stars are just about as clear and numerous as any of us have ever seen. It’s a great night to be out on the ocean.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time staring into the sky today. Part of the TransPac requirement, for Navigators, is to resolve 4 lines of position based upon celestial navigation. It’s been about 10 years since me and my college buddies Ben, Eric, Hans, and Shannon sat in on a ROTC Navy Navigation course at the University of Michigan. I only remember one thing about the celestial navigation part of that course; always remember to pack a hand held GPS and a bunch of extra batteries, just in case the boat’s GPS goes on the fritz…

In the spirit and tradition of the race I spent a couple hours today, relearning the details of how to plot position fixes using a sextant, a watch, the sun, and a computer based set of sight reduction tables….oh, there was also the text book that Brad Avery brought along that served as my crutch throughout the whole process. Without its guidance I, definitely, would not have gotten very far. My first fix took about an hour and a half to resolve. The fix was 124 miles off from our actual position (as compared to our GPS which gives position accurate to less than 2 meters, updated 5 times per second). With the process now streamlined and my work flow sorted out, I was able to resolve my next position in about 40 minutes and was about 55 miles off from our actual position.

We have 231.81 miles left to go in our journey across the Pacific. We are in a parade now. Our goal of finishing in the winning position is an impossibility. Fortunately, tonight, we have great conversation, an endless supply of jokes, a sky full of stars, an upcoming moon rise, warm winds and perfect sailing conditions to keep our spirits high….Sammy’s freshly baked brownies, paired with a glass of cold milk, add quite a nice touch to the evening too…

-Matt out

22 50.940 N

153 14.134 W

(precisely)

Instrument's meltdown?

2009-07-11T14:19:00.000+01:00

“Hey Matt. The instruments aren’t working. Can you reset the system?” was the call I heard from on deck

“Strange. I have data coming into my computer. Must be an ondeck display problem”, I thought to myself. Let’s try turning the instruments off and on again.

A flip-flop of a switch later …..

And, still, nothing.

It was blowing 22 knots, it was cloudy, the sun had just set and the moon had not risen yet. It was pitch black on deck and the guys were, literally, sailing blind.

“This is not good” I thought.

I went for the low hanging fruit again;

Flip -flop…

Nothing.

“Crap. This is not good”

“It must be some sort of connection problem.”

I traced out the cable that connects the on-deck instrument displays to the system down below and set out, in a form of triage, to remove all possible ‘points of failure’. Clip- clip -clip went the wire cutters and I spliced a bundle of cables together. I then hit them with some solder to hold the wrangled mess of wires together.

“That might do it. Lets check”

“Crap. I have NOTHING now?!’, Not even my computer was getting data anymore.

“This is REALLY not good”

“Hey Matt. We can’t see where we are going. Hurry up!” the cries echoed, repeatedly, from on deck.

“Oh boy, where to start? This could be ‘a major’. We might have a full on instrument melt down here. “

My buddy, Sammy, was now by my side helping me figure out the problem. He handed me a cordless drill and we dismantled the panel that contains the electrical, instrumentation and computer systems, revealing a mess of wires of different colors going into and out of a menagerie of boxes.”

“Let’s start with the basics. I wonder if the instruments are getting power. They aren’t responding to anything and we aren’t getting any sort of output…. How is this thing fused?’

‘ … ah. I see one of e2’s power/ network junction boxes back in there. Got a philips head screwdriver Sammy? Let’s look in there.”

Sure enough; A blown 5A fuse. With luck on my side, I found a spare fuse taped to the inside cover of the box. The question was, however, what caused this fuse to trip? This might be the only fuse that we have, who knows, and I don’t want to turn on the power and have it kick again.”

I kept probing.

“Ah ha! Found it. We are out of the woods. It’s a loose network wire.” This would explain the initial network problems and then the eventual blown fuse. I reconnected the wire into its rightful home and flipped on the instrument power.

Full systems go….whew…that was a close one.

Now let’s see if we find just as much luck with a couple wind shifts to claw our way past a couple boats.

Humm…. that could be a bit more complicated…

-Matt out

24 18 N

145 03 W

Pacific Ocean Sleigh Ride....Finally

2009-07-10T06:07:00.000+01:00

18 knots of wind, clearing skies and great sailing today…more importantly, significant gains on our entire fleet with every hourly position report. Great news and spirits are high.

We are half way through the race. It’s now less than 1200nm, before we’ll be sipping on our first Mai Tai on the docks in Honolulu. Thus it was a perfect time for me to break out my ‘finish time contest’. This morning I posed a series of factoids on my bulletin board. The notice read:

As of 1200 (noon) Hawaii Local time today:

Distance to finish: 1200nm

Previous 24 hour run: 300nm

Wind Forecast: 12-20 knots, 40-70 TWD, periods of squalls

Bearing to Finish: 250 degrees

Router time to finish: 4d 8h

Router distance to sail to finish: 1300nm

Everyone submitted ‘secret’ entries, until everyone had a chance to enter, then I posted the entries on the wall of the nav station. There is plenty of consensus for a Tuesday afternoon arrival. However Bruce Nelson, Sam Heck and Brent Ruhne picked times on Monday. While everyone is excited about winning the bottle of rum that goes along with winning the contest, we are focused on the real prize- beating the other Sleds to the finish line.

-Matt out

25 29N

138 33W

TransPac Day 3: Ups and Downs

2009-07-08T05:35:00.000+01:00

Or … to put it into chronological order: Downs and Ups.

We had a very tough pill to swallow this morning. We suffered significant losses in order to execute on our overall race routing and positioning strategy. To compound our woes, we were a couple hours late to change the spinnaker from our reaching oriented A3, to our downwind spinnaker, the A2. Thus, the lead pack of OEX, Pyewacket, and Grand Illusion all gained on us from sun rise to noon this morning. Certainly the questions were asked; “ are we sure that we are doing the right thing here”. There is nothing worse, as a navigator, than having to deliver 3 back to back scheds (position reports) that only feature losses.

However this afternoon thing turned around. Since 2pm we’ve been making massive gains on the fleet. In a 2 hour stretch, from 2 to 4pm, we erased all of our morning’s losses- the expensive move that solidified our southerly lane. From 4pm onward we’ve been mak’n money. Now that the opening moves in the race have been made, and with our competition locked into their lanes, we’ll have to see how we do over the next 4 days on starboard tack. We anticipate making gains down here to the south, but have our eyes on an unstable forecast for the last 2 days of the race. Anything can happen, but for now, there are plenty of smiles to go around onboard the Holua.

-Matt out

27 17.16N

127 58.00W

TransPac Day 2

2009-07-07T04:30:00.002+01:00

From where we left off yesterday we were rounding Catalina Island with the front runners in our class; Pyewacket, Grand Illusion, and OEX. The battle rages on. Pyewacket, Grand Illusion and OEX are in a neck and neck battle, all within sight of each other. Meanwhile we were able to execute our strategy for the first 36 hours of the race exactly as we planned. We came
around Catalina Island at a heading of 215, while the 'pack of three' maintained a slightly higher line. This places that group about 20 miles to the north of us. While the 'race viewer' might show them as closer to Hawaii, and thus on the top of the leader board, we are all within about a
mile of each other, as I score the race. It will be interesting to see how things play out. QuickSCAT images show lighter wind directly in front of usand to the north. This is also reflected in some of the numerical models that I am reviewing. Like the analogy of the runners on the track that I referred to in a blog from just before the race started; We will sail a bit
longer distance (like running around the outer lane 6 on a track) than the group of three to the north (that will run on the inside lane 1). Our plan is to stay in higher wind speeds and in faster true wind angles that those to the north of us. If our plan is correct we will start to reap the rewards over the next 72 hours...

Even though we are only 36 hours into the race we've already had plenty of adventure. The sunny skies that we left under, as we departed Long Beach yesterday, have turned to complete cloud cover today. We left the dock wearing shorts and a t-shirt, while today we have been bundled up in all the clothes that we brought on board. We had to make a repair in our mainsail,
which resulted in sailing with only a headsail, for about an hour last night. We have seen dolphins, flying fish and sun fish swim by our boat. And, I am very happy to report, that we have been eating like kings. Sammy Heck, the boat's captain, has put together a full-on royal menu. We had Honey Nut Cheerios swimming in ice cold milk for breakfast, peanut butter
and concord grape jelly sandwiches for snack, turkey-tomato-avocado sandwiches for lunch, and a three course dinner of soup, salad, and beef stroganoff over rice. Maybe I'll have some grapes or an orange for desert. Thinking practically, Sammy packed the boat with 'real food' for the first 5 days, where extra 'cargo' on the right side of the boat makes us faster. Once we get to the last half of the race, where being as light as possible is advantageous we will supplement with freeze dried food.

Brack Duker, the owner of Holua, has put together an all star cast of characters, and we are having a tremendous time out here. We are racing hard just as hard as we are laughing, so I'd say we have the trim of theboat just about right.

-Matt out
29 44.2N
123 29.5W

Back at it: The TransPac is underway

2009-07-06T00:33:00.001+01:00

Aloha from the Holua.

At 1pm this afternoon we started our race to Hawaii. The conditions could not have been better for both racers and spectators. We were sent off by a tremendous fleet of the race fans that came out for Sunday afternoon pleasure cruises.

In an effort to start at the favored pin end of the line, we were pushed over early, by a couple aggressive boats below us, just before the gunsounded. This forced us to dip around the pin end of the line and restart. Because we were quick to respond we didn't loose that much on the fleet and were able to reach down into a clear lane of wind. By the time we reached Catalina Island, 20 miles upwind, we were back in touch with the leaders. With some fabulous crew work, that included 8 tacks and 2 sail changes below the rock cliffs of Catalina Island, we found ourselves in front of our class. The other front runners in our class our Alchemy and Pyewacket.

Right now we are exactly where I hoped we'd be coming around Catalina Island. We have our with our bow poked out just a bit and are in the leeward lane... Just the perfect place to execute our race plan over the next 48 hours. Curious what that plan is? Well, I'm not going to tell you. You'll just have to wait and see what we have up our sleeves.

-Matt out
33 22.3 N
118 44.4 W

Group 2 is off and racing

2009-07-02T23:38:00.009+01:00

The TransPac is a 2230 mile race from Long Beach Ca, to Diamond Head, the infamous backdrop to Waikiki Beach in Oahu. Since there are boats of all sizes competing, the race starts in 3 waves so that the different classes will finish at about the same general time. The slower boats started on Monday, the middle group started at 1pm this afternoon, and our group, of the fastest boats, will start on Sunday.

The dock talk this morning was abuzz about a weather forecast that is misbehaving... The more complicated and abnormal the better, I'd say...but apparently not all navigators and skippers would agree with me.

Let's have a look at the weather scenario for those that kicked off their 2009 TransPac this afternoon in the middle group;

In a 'normal weather scenario' the racers are pushed along by winds rotating, clockwise, around the Pacific High. Typically the center of the High is located directly west of northern California at a Longitude somewhere midway between Hawaii and the west coast of the USA. The weather maps in this scenario would look quite plane; a big 'H' out in the ocean with a bunch of concentric circles of increasing size around around the H. These rings depict the isobars (lines of equal pressure). The wind close to the H is light and the wind a couple rings out away from the H is nice for downwind surfing....thus the strategy is similar to running on a track. Would you rather be a slow runner running around a track on the inside lane one, or a fast runner on the outside lane six.

Most of the woes on the dock this morning were focused on this image:

Quite different from 'normal'; you can see a front that reaches up from Hawaii, an L where an H should be, and massive gaps between the isobar lines. This all indicates very little wind and very tricky conditions. The trade winds are, for all practical purposes, completely shut down. Furthermore, the 500 millibar analysis features a massive trough that is further complicating the 'normal' wind flow at the upper levels.

To look at a wind and pressure (MSLP) analysis (from the 12z GFS model run, plotted in Expedition), you can see that there is very little wind across the rhumb line (as noted by the black arc below). The areas of light wind are noted by the light purple regions, while the windy areas are in the green - to red side of the color spectrum.

You can see that the analysis changes quite a bit over the next 5 days. This is what the wind will look like about half way through the race for those that started today:You can see, by the blue regions just below the rhumb line, that some normalcy will return to the Eastern Pacific by the middle of next week.

So what will the game plan be for the boat starting today? I've heard that some boats are going to attempt a north route, while others will attempt a deep southerly route as their long range plan. While the boats started this afternoon in a coastal 12 knot sea breeze, the wind will quickly drop off to below 5 knots by around 3am tomorrow morning. It will most likely be a very slow morning for the fleet in group 2. I'd put my money on the boats that favor the southerly route coming out of the blocks. Those that press north will be rolling the dice and could likely find them selves adrift.

It's going to be a complicated couple days, but the race course is full of opportunity when the weather is this dynamic. Plenty of people asked for my opinion this morning before they left...the best advice that I could give was, "start on Sunday".

-Matt out
33 45.69N
118 11.62W

Fast forward to now

2009-07-01T06:44:00.003+01:00

Where last I left the blog, I promised that the blog would continue....

Clearly, it's taken awhile for me to come around. I must admit, once I left Team Delta Lloyd, I ran out of ideas for blog posts. I had a fully diagnosed and incurable case of writers block. While I anticipated continuing to write blog posts about the VOR from the sidelines, I discovered that I had a lot more to say as a race participant than as a race pundit.

On my way home from Singapore, I swung through Boracay, a 1x7km island in the Philippines. I lived there for a month. I was the perfect way to unwind from the VOR. The very humble room that I rented was located above a cafe on a long white sand beach. I spent most all of my time in Boracay kite boarding, running, swimming and eating copious amounts of fresh seafood. When I returned home to San Francisco, I moved into a new apartment - conveniently located about 3 blocks away from the St Francis Yacht Club. The sailing season was close around the corner so I spent the remaining weeks of winter and the early spring enjoying some fabulous skiing conditions in Tahoe, while also working on some business development oriented consulting projects.

As the sailing season started to kick into gear several sailing projects headed my way, including the opportunity to sail in the TransPac as the navigator for Holua, a very successful Santa Cruz 70 program. I immediately jumped at the chance. We've had one event leading up to the TransPac, the Cal Cup, which we won, and have done some offshore testing as part of our preparations. Most of the crew have spent a lot of time with the boat and sailing with each other over the past several years, so I am the 'new guy' on the team.

It's great to be back at it; immersing myself into racing, polar optimizations, sail cross over development, and weather analysis. It also feels good to be writing again. Maybe my writers blog has been cured. I have plenty of blog topics on my mind, so hopefully the Volvo Hotseat blog can pick up where it left off.

-Matt out.

on Thursday I'll post a weather briefing for the Divisions that are starting at 1 pm PDT, later that day.

Getting back into the Hot Seat....

2009-06-30T23:28:00.001+01:00

I was working at my computer this afternoon, sifting through GOES satellite images from the Pacific Ocean, when I got an email from my college buddy Ben;

"Matt, you are doing the TransPac this year. What do you think about bringing back your blog? Come on...bring it back..."

Alright Ben, you've got it, my 'Hot Seat blog' is back...stay tuned...

-Matt out

It's time to move on...

2009-01-09T04:36:00.003Z

I'm leaving Team Delta Lloyd. This interview with Volvo gives a pretty good summary of what happened: Click Here

But don't worry, the blog will continue. As always, if you have topics that you want me to cover let me know: blog@gregorysports.com

-Matt out

Finally in Singapore

2008-12-24T07:47:00.002Z

We made it. Here is an interview that was recorded as I stepped off of the boat and onto the dock. It pretty much says it all : Click here

To all of my friends and family, I miss you all very much and wish I could be with you over Christmas and New Year...

Matt out

Still Sailing

2008-12-21T23:05:00.001Z

We are still sailing, which means that we are still in the race. We are almost 200 miles behind the leaders but still pressing on to the finish of Leg 3 under sail.

We are badly broken but not out. Hopefully we can make Singapore under sail, and that would be a victory in itself. One great thing about the Volvo 70 is that even with the throttle set at idle, we can still make 9 or 10 knots, given a decent wind. Not too bad.

But a new problem popped up today. We can’t keep hydraulic fluid in the one remaining cylinder that is holding the keel in the center cant position. This means that the keel slowly creeps to the leeward side. Hydraulic oil is running out of the cylinder and into the bilge. It’s a huge mess. We’ve used all of our spare oil. Now we are collecting the oil/water slurry that ends up in the bilge. We pour it into buckets, let it settle, skim off the oil from the water and pour the oil back into the hydraulic pump.

Yup, this is a long leg. Knowing that we all have a week long vacation when we get to Singapore only makes us more anxious to put this leg behind.

In the mean time, we’ll keep sailing.

Up Side of Down

2008-12-19T18:05:00.005Z

Not so bad, this being broken.

After the initial shock and disappointment of the BIG BANG, it became apparent that we would be able to make the Malacca Strait and sail the boat to Singapore, even with a separated bulkhead and a crippled keel ram.

As ugly goes, this was fantastic news.

Then it dawned on me that my workload as navigator was dramatically reduced. Basic route planning, weather analysis, piece of cake. The logical next goal was a good night's sleep. I got up from my desk, brushed my teeth, washed my face with fresh water and dragged our big masthead spinnaker into a nice corner of the boat. I fell asleep with the thought that I wasn’t going to get up until the sun came up. A couple dreams later, I decided to move into an open bunk on the leeward side. Yes, the strange, unexplored leeward side of the boat. I pressed on in my mission to sleep until dawn.

Later, back to the sail bag.

Later, back to the bean bag.

When I woke up for real the sun was shining down the companionway hatch. Mission complete. Man, I have felt amazing all day today.

Photo by Sander Plujim/Team Delta Lloyd/Volvo Ocean Race

I drove for couple hours, casually confirmed that we were still heading east, radioed a passing tanker in my best trucker accent, and spent time joking with my mates. That's the great Ryan "Housty" Houston above, left.

This is working. I just might sleep two nights in a row.

Out, until the sun comes up.

HQ, We Have a Problem

2008-12-18T20:40:00.004Z

I was lying in a bunk catching up on sleep. Dreaming about something, I don't remember what.

I woke to the sound of a deafening explosion. There is just no other way to describe it.

BAM

(!)

Something major. Broken. I sprang up. I waited for the rig to hit the water. I heard nothing. The sails weren’t even flapping.

Screams from the crew

It’s something in the boat.”

“Check the chain plates!’

“Are the bulkheads ok?”

“Did we de-laminate?”

“We are taking the headsail down. Can we have another body on deck?”

“Get the tool box. I need the Allen keys. We need to open the keel box to see the rams”

“Holy shit. This is it! It’s bad!”

“Emergency water pumps ready.”

Grab bags and survival suits were pulled out of the locker in case.

Photo by Sander Plujim/Team Delta Lloyd/Volvo Ocean Race

I got on the sat phone. The first call was to the Volvo Race HQ. “This is Matt Gregory. We have a problem. We’ve had a massive failure to the port side bulkhead that attaches the keel canting hydraulic ram to the boat. We aren’t sure of the situation yet. Can you put everyone on standby? We might need help from the Russians; they are the closest boat to us. Are you receiving our position through the telemetry?”

After some tense moments we were able to assess our prospects. The hull was intact. Water was not coming into the boat, and the starboard side ram was holding the load of the keel. We had a stable situation, were not in immediate danger, and now needed to figure out what to do next, not to create a dangerous situation.

We called Juan K, our boat’s designer. He helped us determine that the damage was contained to the port side keel ram structures. The starboard side structures and ram would be strong enough to allow us to go upwind and into the waves - east towards the Malacca Straights and then towards Singapore. The closest land, which happens to be the scoring gate, is 400 miles away. We don’t have enough diesel fuel to motor the entire way, so being able to sail in some capacity is important. Also, because the boat heels, sailing helps reduce the pounding loads on the boat moving upwind and into the waves. With the keel uncanted and in the center position, we are able to gingerly sail upwind. This is good news.

Right now, we are making headway in 15 knots of wind, sailing with a reef in the main and a J4 headsail.

(It's a tiny staysail like headsail.)

We are coordinating with our shore team and Volvo Race HQ to manage the logistics of getting the boat to Singapore. This might involve sailing to Indonesia, taking on fuel, and then motoring the rest of the way. But these are details. For now, we are all happy to be safe and for our boat to be in one piece

Well, sort of one piece.

I've adjusted my Christmas wish list.

Two Sides of One Coin

2008-12-16T20:09:00.004Z

Yesterday was one of those days.

We were approaching the turning mark at the 'pirate
exclusion zone' and nicely sailing in about 12 knots of
wind. We needed to simply round a virtual coordinate, freeing us to sail east across the Bay of Bengal. I was exhausted and I was
looking forward to a nap after the rounding.

Then, about 8 miles short, the wind started to die.

By the time the wind got down to 4 knots we were not able to keep up with the current that was flowing against us at 2.5 knots. For 8 hours we struggled to make progress south. Meanwhile, the rest of the fleet made the turn and sailed away in moderate winds, perpendicular to the current.

For us it was like walking up a down-escalator and finding out that iPhones are being given away for free on the third floor of the mall. You can see the stampede of people running towards the Apple store, but you are trapped running as fast as you can, arms pumping wildly, going nowhere, unable to keep up with an endless Stairmaster throwing stair after stair after stair at you.

Finally the wind gods stopped their torturous joke. We got around the mark, but the fleet gained 35 miles on us in their shopping bonanza. Pissed off, exhausted and frustrated I climbed into a bunk for a nap.

A couple hours later the sun set and we were gently sailing along in 8 knots of wind. To find a way to put my self in a better mood, I took an iPod, a water bottle and a freeze dry Chicken Korma up to the foredeck. It was a perfectly clear and dark night. I ate dinner and then reclined on our A4 spinnaker, which makes a perfect bean bag chair. Dressed simply in a pair of board shorts, on a comfortably warm Indian Ocean night, I lay looking up at the mast, sails and an uncountable number of crisp bright stars. The darkness was, every so often, interrupted by a flash of lightning from a thunderstorm that was passing us by far off on the horizon. With "The Cars - Magic" playing in my headphones, I decided that life was not so bad after all. I watched a nearly full moon rise from the east and decided it was time to go back to work.

We've made gains over the past 16 hours and we are clawing our way back into this race.

Matt out

Yo-Yo Parade

2008-12-14T22:47:00.003Z

The weather brief from our meteorologist, Fritz Koek, has been spot on so far. Simply put, the short sprint from the start, down to the virtual marks that Volvo laid to the south of Sri Lanka, would be full of geographically placed 'bands of wind' and 'bands of little wind'. From the start:

-
A band of westerly sea breeze
-
No wind
-
A band of land breeze from the east
-
No wind
-
A band of 20 knots from the east, funneling between India and Sri Lanka
-
Little wind on the lee side of Sri Lanka as we round the first turning mark
-

And that's where we are as I write. The strategic implications of this brief?

In theory: After the first park up, in no wind, the first boats to work east and south into the land breeze would jump ahead of the fleet. Winning the first six hours would be key in this Yo-Yo race.

In fact: During the first park-up, the entire fleet was separated by only one or two miles. But two miles was all the leaders needed to then leap ahead 30 miles; they got the land breeze first and sailed away.

Yo

Time for the boats in the back to play catch up as the leaders sailed into the next parking lot. We were all separated by only a handful of miles yet again.

Yo

The leaders got south into the strong funneling wind from the east and zoomed away.

Yo

Still blast reaching at 20 knots the trailing boats caught back up to the leaders.

Yo

How many more 'Yo's' are left in this leg?

Stay tuned.

Yo

Christmas in Singapore?

2008-12-13T21:29:00.006Z

Three hours into leg three.

The entire fleet is sailing due south along the west coast of India in a nice westerly seabreeze. We are flying our A4, a big downwind sail, and cruising along at 10 knots of boatspeed in 9-11 knots of wind. This won't last forever.

I expect the wind to die in about two hours. We most likely will come to a complete stop. A new wind is coming, however. The winter monsoon, a northeast gradient, should set the tone of things and get us moving south once again. As we leave India behind and turn the corner, we'll add extra distance to skirt an exclusion zone that Volvo has set around the southern coast of the island of Sri Lanka; the zone is intended to keep us clear of a gang of pirates that apparently even have their own 'air force'.

Once we clear the land masses of India and Sri Lanka we will be able to head east across the Bay of Bengal. The northeast monsoon will still be our driving weather pattern through this 1,000 mile stretch of open ocean.

Sailing mostly on port tack, at maximum upwind angles we will have a couple of strategic decisions to make.

To the north of our expected track there should be more wind; to the south, a light and shifty convergence zone that is full of clouds, rain and not much wind. However because of the mechanical forces that propel the boat through the water, going south is easy, going north is difficult. We can reach a bit, to sail faster, but then we will be flirting with the convergence zone and the risk of being swallowed up by calms. Going north then seems like the obvious choice, but we can sail only so close to the wind. Climbing up to the windier areas might be costly if we have to sail in full upwind mode or very costly if we actually have to tack. We'll just have to wait and see what micro weather systems exist when we turn east.The last 600 miles of the race will be incredibly tricky as we sail down the Strait of Malacca, with Sumatra to the west and Malaysia to the east. This is a narrow strip of water that is full of fishing boats, fishing nets, commercial shipping, more fishing nets, and, yes, more pirates. But this is also an area of very little wind and an opposing current. No reason to expect it to be easy.

For the last couple of days before we started this leg, the wives and girlfriends of my team mates were asking if my forecasting models show us getting to Singapore in time for Christmas. I didn't have the heart to tell them directly what I was thinking. The truth is, I don't care when we get to Singapore, except in relation to the fleet. All I want for Christmas is a podium finish.

YOU are going for a wild ride....

2008-12-08T14:04:00.008Z

Pull your chair up close to your desk, and strap on your seat belt. Thanks to the media guys at Delta Lloyd, I have a really cool video to share with you today. This is an 'MTV style' compilation video of our team Delta Lloyd in Legs 1 and 2 of the Volvo Ocean Race.

If you want to download the high res version click here. It's only 80 MB... a quick download, and definitely worth seeing in the full version!

-Matt out

It doesn't matter if you like cherries....

2008-12-07T14:24:00.003Z

Today I was walking through the Volvo Ocean Race Village on my way from our base to the race headquarters for a meeting. While wearing my 'MBA hat', I was thinking about why this stopover has been so overwhelmingly popular. This sort of enthusiasm is common for the Volvo Ocean Race in Europe where the race is followed intensely. However, consider that these fans are not sailors. They know absolutely nothing about sailing nor anything about the history of the race. I asked myself "why are they all of these people here if they are not sailing fans?"

I've figured it out. Strangely, this stopover reminded me a lot of the Cherry Festival in Traverse City Michigan. If you either live or vacation in northern Michigan, the Cherry festival is a 'must attend' summer event. It doesn't matter if you grow, pick, sell, bake, or for that matter, even like cherries, you'd still go to the festival as a highlight of the summer season. Volvo has managed to not only capture the adventurous imagination of the local people of Cochin, but they've also turned this stopover into a 'must attend' event for the local people. 'Bravo' Volvo....this is exactly where the future of the 'professional' end of our sport needs to head.

The 2008 edition of the Volvo Ocean Race seems to be extending the path for the future commercialization of professional sailing. This race is creating a fantastic show for the public to match the intense racing on the water. While this race will always have a loyal technical and sailing fans, this world class event is developing into a traveling 'circus' with attractions, concerts and up-close and personal access to boats and teams. Meanwhile behind the scenes sponsors are using this event to entertain and build relationships with their most valuable customers. Team sponsors are also using the stopovers as a platform for launching global internal communications and team building projects. Throw in a parade of elephants here and there and it's easy to see that there is a lot going on at a Volvo Ocean Race stopover!

-Matt out

"How is India?"

2008-12-05T11:45:00.005Z

My friends have sent me a million emails, all with the same question. "How is India?"

It's incredible.
(I'm, also, fine... by the way.)

I must admit that the Cochin stopover was not on the top of my list of places that I was 'most' excited about visiting on this world tour. The edge of Rio, the 'homecoming' in Boston, the Midsummer parties in Stockholm, and the finish in Russia, were on the top of my list. I was a bit melancholy about Cochin. It's hot, there are a lot of mosquitoes, eating the 'wrong' food will make you sick and internet access is very limited. Furthermore I thought that Cochin might be a dangerous place considering the recent events in the country.

But none of that matters. This stopover is amazing. I love this place!

A lot of my excitement comes directly from the people of Cochin who are going absolutely bonkers over the Volvo Ocean Race. When we arrived there were thousands upon thousands of people here to greet us. Like rock stars, we were led down 'greeting line', where every onlooker wanted to welcome us to their city and shake our hands. When we walk around the streets crowds engulf us, asking for our names, our autographs and about our participation in the race. Nightly the race village bulges at the seams to make room for all of the people that come for the exhibitions, concerts and attractions . During the day thousands of people wait patiently in ques of up to 5 hours long to ride on the Volvo 70 sailing simulator, walk through the Volvo pavilion and to get an up close boat view of the boats from the spectator platform.

The local military and police have the race village under tight security and they are all armed with very large guns. However, this does not distract from the local 'karma' that is overtly friendly and enthusiastically welcoming. Although the security is very intense, I feel completely safe here.

I'm looking forward to the next 10 days that we have left to enjoy the city of Cochin. Here are some photos that I took today.

Our boat is well guarded

A local fishing boat cruising down the river next to the VOR village.
We passed hundreds of these boats on our way in to the finish line of leg 2. Needless to say the sea food here is absolutely fabulous!

What's a day in India with out seeing an elephant walk by? Apparently it's a rarity.

-Matt out.

Dockside in Kochin India

2008-12-02T11:42:00.002Z

Click here for a link to my dockside interview with VOR.

Stand by for some blogs from the shore.... I'll work to keep the blog updated with 'the stopover experience'

Matt out

Rhymes With

2008-12-01T14:39:00.001Z

Sorry I went silent. This has been the most intense racing of my life. Pure adrenalin and forget about sleep.

With Puma, Green Dragon and Telefonica Negro all in sight, we had a four boat contest where winning would take perfection.

T. Negro made an inside move that flipped them from the back to the front of the pack.

We were second with Puma next door, Green Dragon a couple miles back. The entire group was traveling in a line, fast- reaching for the finish at Cochin.

Bam…

(rhymes with)

We blew up a genoa sheet.

Puma passed.

We will finish just minutes behind them.

We are about 16 miles from the line. The reality that I’m an hour away from arriving in India is starting to sink in. Sailing to India…are you kidding me? Who does that? I can’t believe that a month ago we were in Spain, and now here we are. It seems a bit crazy. I know that when we step off the boat the crew of Delta Lloyd will be in a very different place. I’m looking forward to it!

Matt out

Howdy, Northern Hemsiphere

2008-11-29T04:46:00.006Z

Equator crossing number two . . .

. . . aaaand, we're across.

Looking back to our first crossing, southbound through the Atlantic from Spain to South Africa, I missed the crossing. I was asleep, hunched over the keyboard of my nav station. So it was gratifying to be conscious for this second crossing to see the ‘S’ change to an ‘N’. It’s a cool thing to watch if you are a navigator type. For some reason, only sailors make a big deal about crossing the equator. On airplane flights they make hardly a mention. For us, the crossing ritual is taken seriously.

As ourr offering to King Neptune, we donated tomorrow’s ration of beef jerky.

I hope he likes beef jerky.

Unfortunately, those of us who were equatorial virgins and thus duly punished by King Neptune on our crossing, southbound in leg one, didn’t have the opportunity to pass along the ‘spirit’ of the punishment tradition to a new comer, this time.

Or fortunately, for someone. This would have been a brutal passing for a first-timer. Stu Wilson, who’s been over the equator any number of times, informed us, “Neptune seems to be angrier, the slower the boat speed and the calmer the wind”.

Considering that in leg one we were blast-reaching at 15 knots, it was all Neptune could do to organize a slurry of food to dump on our heads. I got off easy. In becalmed conditions and where the first time crossers are outnumbered by 10 to 1, Stu has instigated ‘ceremonies’ that have lasted the entire day. His favorite: Duct taping first-timers' hands to the grinder-pedestal handles.

You are warned.

The Green Dragon is still alongside, 200 meters away. The drag race continues.

And it is a grueling grind through light air to the finish. With Ericsson 4 and Telefonica Blue already in Cochin, the boats still out have special demons to fight. Over the weekend, before it got quite so hard, Matt reflected on the situation in an audio broadcast that you can listen to here.

Exciting . . . Becalmed

2008-11-28T03:59:00.007Z

This is exciting racing, for being becalmed in the Indian Ocean.

Right now we can see Green Dragon, Puma and Ericsson 3. We are all just a couple miles away from each other. It is amazing if you consider that we’ve been sailing for nearly two weeks, across three oceans, between two continents, and here we are a group of four separated by a few miles. Here we see Martin Watts and our skipper, "Chuny," at work.

Photo by Sander Plujim/Delta Lloyd/Volvo Ocean Race

Is the racing intense? Ha.

Twilight falls.

Green Dragon sends a text message:

“Turn on your nav lights.”

Apparently we were 5 minutes late.

Do you think they’ll be watching us all night long? Yup. Just as intently as we will be watching them.

Hey Ian, I see you seeing me, seeing you, seeing me.

Happy Thanksgiving to my family in Michigan, my sister in San Diego and friends all over. I am very thankful to have you all in my life. See you again when this race is complete. And the audio version of today's racing is here.

Pick and Roll and

2008-11-26T23:54:00.003Z

Let’s try to sum up our day in the five minutes available while I wait for the weather download from our satellite communication connection. This could be difficult to write (to tap into the communication brain while the analytical brain is working overtime).

We’ve made massive gains. All our work strategizing about positioning for "Race 2" has paid off. We passed both Telefonica Boats and are ahead of the Russians. Puma is 7 miles off our bow as I type.

Today was a day to ‘pick and roll’ off clouds, sailing in and out of rain squalls with an uncountable number of wind changes and sail changes.

The rain was not only great for taking a quick, warm fresh-water shower, it was also a great opportunity to capture fresh water to relieve the pressure on our injured water maker. Using our mainsail like a funnel and cooking kettles as cisterns, we stocked up.

I won’t bother with sleep tonight. We're skipping cloud to cloud. This is full focus, high stakes racing and it really does feel like I'm sitting in the hotseat. Gains and losses turn on every decision and interpretation of weather data, radar imagery, gut feel.

Whoa, I didn't have five minutes. Two minutes?

Here comes a yellow blob on the radar screen.

Got to run. This rain cloud looks like a doozey.

About two hours later came the following [ed.]

SU:We just passed Puma.
I can see them a couple miles away with my night vision goggles.

Race 2, Leg 2, Apollo 13.2

2008-11-26T04:20:00.014Z

We're into the second race of the second leg, the passage of the Doldrums.

It looks to be a short crossing, thanks to a nicely timed tropical wave, and we’ve been honing in on that wave for a couple of days as it brings the easterly trade winds farther north. Meanwhile a cyclone off Sri Lanka is creating a westerly flow to the north, bringing those winds farther south. The prospect? A narrow transition and a narrow patch of Doldrums.

We can’t get to India too soon. The first week of this leg was brutal. The fixit list for Cochin is long. The most recent item to break was our water-making system, which filters sea water into drinkable-fresh. The hose that connects the series of in-line filters ruptured from its end fitting and water was shooting everywhere inside the engine compartment until we managed to turn it off. The probable culprit: hot ocean water temperatures softening a high-pressure hose.

Imagine 100-degree air, 90-degree water, and a motley crew without water to drink. To make matters worse, our food is freeze-dried, not edible unless hydrated. Let's say the same thing a different way: No water, no food.

While the rest of the crew pressed on sailing the boat, our master fix-it man Ed (aka Edwin O'Connor) engineered a solution. Every time we break something, it's like a scene out of the movie, Apollo 13. Remember the sequence where the team of engineers is tasked with making a new filter with only a few sparse items dumped on a table, mimicking items onboard the capsule? A boat at sea is not so different from a space capsule. We have what we have and nothing more. Running to the hardware store is not an option.

After some head scratching, Ed concluded that none of the other tubing on the boat would fit the end fittings, nor would they withstand the pressure of the system. So, Ed further concluded, the broken hose itself had to be fixed and returned to service. He starting by cutting off the fractured bit of tube. Then, by rearranging the pumps and filters, he was able to join the pump to the filter. Finally—the ingenious part of the solution—he tight-wrapped the remaining hose with Kevlar sail-repair tape to reinforce the sidewalls, to keep the tube from fracturing again.

So we're making water again. And we are holding our collective breath that the repair really will prove fracture-proof for another four days.

The racing—we continue to increase our lead on Telefonica Black and the Russians while making gains on the lead pack of four. I’m going back on deck armed with night-vision goggles and my handbearing compass. These are the latitudes for cloud stalking. The hunt will be long tonight. I’m not expecting much rest until we transition to Race Three. Look below for a few of Sander Plujim's pics from recent days and hours. Otherwise, this is . . .

Matt out

Bowman Gerd Jan Poortman does his pointy-end thing
Photo by Sander Plujim/Delta Lloyd/Volvo Ocean Race

Our skipper, Roberto Bérmudez de Castro—he's done this race three times before and it's a cool name but we just call him Chuny—in driving-lesson mode
Photo by Sander Plujim/Delta Lloyd/Volvo Ocean Race

Chuny, Ed van Lierde and Ed O'Conner at work. Did I mention that Ed pretty much put the boat together for this race?
Photo by Sander Plujim/Delta Lloyd/Volvo Ocean Race

Counting the Races

2008-11-24T17:15:00.001Z

1500 miles and 4 races to go.

Looking at our track on my navigation computer, you’d think that we’re almost to India. Hardly. We have 4 races left to go on leg 2.

Race 1: The Blast, a boat-speed race on a reach. We are currently sailing in 20 knots of easterly trades with our R1 reaching headsail and a reef in the main. The gains and losses here will be made with brawn, not brains. The fastest boat with the heaviest foot on the throttle will come out of this section ahead.

Race 2: The Doldrums, a race of patience: This 300 mile section of ocean east of the Chagos Archipelago is full of pitfalls. Finding a way around local clouds, riding zephyrs, living on patience will be the focus. Finding the shortest route through this section will be key. Like jumping over a stream in the woods, we’ll want to find a good take off and landing point at the narrowest part of the stream. The boats that make the right bets will make huge gains.

Race 3: The getaway and set up for the finish. Six hundred miles and an equatorial crossing. The boats that get out of the doldrums first will be focused on putting distance on the poor souls that are still stuck with sails flapping in 100 degree heat. Everyone will be eager to make the getaway. The wind will greet us from the west and we will once again make steady progress. Speed is always key but finding the best heading to set up positioning for Race 4 will be paramount.

Race 4: On to the finish. This will be scrappy. The mainland of India will be to our east and there is a likelihood of storms. The wind gradient will most likely be light for the last 200 miles of the race. Conventional thought would be to head for the coast to pick up sea breeze by day and land breeze by night. However, water temperatures in this part of the world are around 90 degrees F (30 C) so there isn’t much potential for wind generated by land/sea gradients. Who knows how we will get through this part of the race? We don’t. We’ll continue to monitor the Indian monsoon weather patterns and formulate a plan, but between now and then we have 3 other races to work out.

Advanced Biology

2008-11-24T02:59:00.003Z

Day eight, leg two, and the fast sailing continues.

Even with yesterday’s ‘mellow’ conditions, our odometer has been ticking. We have logged over 3,500 miles since the start of the leg. Doing some crude math, that's an average of better than 400 miles per day at an average of better than 17 knots.

No one expected this leg to go so quickly. We are into our fifth weather pattern and each has nearly-seamlessly linked up with the next. Each has produced winds allowing us to sail in the direction we want to sail. A week before the start of leg two, when teammates asked when we’d arrive in India my response was, Never. Twenty-three days seemed not out of the question, making the leg three start for Singapore a worry in itself. Wrong. We are well ahead of schedule.

Again we have our favorite sail up, the Fractional Zero, and again we are power reaching in easterly tradewinds. We will crank out another 450 mile day. When the sun comes up tomorrow we will be at the threshold of the doldrums. The leaders will lose the tradewinds first, and the fleet will compress.

From here, the final 1200 miles to Cochin will be tricky. The water temperature is nearly 30 degrees C in this part of the ocean. Hot water, hot air, and calms breed squalls and thunderstorms. I’m not expecting to get much sleep as we try to link cloud to cloud. Think six days more and expect some shakeups in the leader board.

Stop press. The sun just came up and we see the Russians. They are just to leeward and ahead, no longer a blip on the computer screen. Time to do some hunting.

But before I go, this scene from Saturday:

Gerd Jan ‘Johnnie’ Poortman, climbs onto the deck and sez,

"Where am I? I went through the wrong door of the time machine. Beam me up Scottie.”

A lot had changed during his four-hour slumber.

Sun. Warmth. Nice smoooooth waves, 15 knots of wind. All these had mysteriously arrived. The boat was silently, gently, brushing aside a bow wave at 14 knots.

Fortunately, for me, I’ve had an action packed day. We’ve been moving the boat through a wind transition zone, like a queen attacking the king on a chess board. That's kept me occupied. Otherwise I might have been nominated to clean up the ‘super fund’ toxic waste site onboard Delta Lloyd. Fortunately, I can tell the story in the third person and not the first.

Our boat, for safety reasons, is divided into four sections, each separated by a water-tight bulkhead. In each bulkhead is a door permitting passage from one compartment to the next. We live in the middle two. There is an aft compartment that contains all the steering mechanisms. There is a forward compartment, just two feet square, barely big enough for a person to climb into. We use it for storing trash. It is now known as the super fund site.

Two days ago, I was sitting in my nav station, holding on for dear life because of the violent motions of the boat, when I noticed two guys making a tremendous commotion up front. When I looked up, they said “Hey Matt, get up here. You have to see this.”

They were laughing.

Bad sign.

When I crawled to the front of the boat they handed me a flashlight and instructed me to look in the forward compartment. So I did. I grabbed the flashlight and poked my arm and my head through the door . . .

It was horrible. I lurched back. The laughter was now hysterical. I managed a chuckle and a comment: “Oh, that’s not good, not good at all.”

What it is:

The three trash bags that we had stored in the bow from our first five days exploded. I’d use a word more dynamic than exploded if I knew of one, because ‘exploded’ honestly does not even come close. Left-over food, empty freeze-dry packages, tea bags, toilet paper, candy wrappers, all were plastered to the walls and ceiling. The rest of the trash was floating in a cauldron, a cist. A swamp of sea water that had penetrated the compartment completed the brew, and it had been shaking around up there for three days. The smell was very, very, very, very bad.

Did I mention that it smelled bad?

We shut the door and called it a problem for a calm day.

Since today Scottie beamed us into this parallel universe of calm seas and gentle sailing, we decided that today was The Day. Soon we will be in 100+ degree heat. This is a project we could not put off until India. ‘Dutch’ Ed and ‘Media Man’ Sander were the brave souls who volunteered for the clean-up. When they went in, I wasn’t sure that they would ever come back. Going anywhere near the opening in the bulkhead made me choke. I ran away before I passed out or . . .

I'm an engineer. I don't have words for supergawdawfulness.

Ninety minutes later Sander and Ed emerged. Like soldiers just returned from the front, they have fallen silent, exchanging glances between them that seem to tell tales only a veteran could understand. I assume that both will suffer post traumatic stress for the remainder of the race.

The door to the forward compartment is shut. I don't know the details and I don't want to know the details but I assume our slurry has been rebagged and that is the best that can be done. I assume that the next seven or so days of sailing through the tropics will cook up quite a biology experiment. I assume I hope I think I can pretend that part of the boat does not exist.

Matt out out out

Go Blue

2008-11-21T02:42:00.005Z

The story remains the same. More fast sailing.

We just gybed and now we're heading north towards India, hitching a ride on another low pressure system. The sea is relatively calm, considering winds in the mid twenties. We have our favorite sails up, the fractional zero and a single-reefed main. Every ounce of weight is stacked in the most extreme-aft position to keep the bow, and the speed, up. With small waves the boat makes 23-26 knots for minutes at a time, since we aren’t crashing into waves ahead.

I’ve spent a lot of time strategizing over how we should position ourselves on this new course. The Delta Lloyd team made the decision two days ago to ignore mid-course scoring gate positioning. We want to get to India, and we want to get there in good standing. That is our focus. The boys are pushing the boat hard, and we are catching boats in front of us. After a tough start to the leg, we are crawling back. We passed Telefonica Black and the Russians this afternoon. Telefonica Blue and Green Dragon are just miles away and we are closing.

And then:
A special ‘thank you’ to the University of Michigan Sailing Team. During the Cape Town stopover we received a letter from the team wishing us the best of luck in the Volvo Ocean Race. They included a burgee. Being a fanatical University of Michigan double-alum (once to study mechanical engineering and again for an MBA) I’ve mounted the burgee on my navigation computer.

Being part of the Sailing Team at ‘U of M’ is a life honor. Many of my favorite people and best friends came out of that college sailing team, and now I get to take the team's burgee for a loop around the planet. Hopefully there will be a big group of Wolverines in Boston waving the M flag when we arrive there in the spring.

“Go blue.”

Photo by Sander Plujim/Delta Lloyd/Volvo Ocean Race

More news: The London Times has asked me to write a weekly column. My deadline is every Thursday, but I’m not sure whether the piece will appear on Friday or over the weekend. And that is your heads-up.

Matt out

Hubcaps and Potholes

2008-11-18T19:23:00.003Z

We are sailing with our Fractional Code Zero. This is a brilliant sail. The Weapon. This sail does everything well.

Right now what is it doing really well?

Scaring the crap out of me.

We are sailing in a rough sea state at 40 degrees south. This is a cold and isolated part of the planet. The local road commission needs to get down here and fix some pot holes. We drop into square trenches that make the boat shake in a very scary way. This might be our most violent ride so far. The windspeed varies with the clouds cruising by. We are seeing anything from 25 knots to long periods of 38 knots of wind. The sun just set. We have Chuny, our new skipper, driving. He is amazing in this stuff, very good at keeping the hub caps on the wheels.

A couple days ago I talked about the importance controlling emotions. This is one of the times where I stay calm because of my confidence in the crew.

(20 minute break) --- back space back space --

I was typing the next sentence in that thought when I was interrupted with a call from on deck.

"Furl the zero”.

Now we're sailing with the staysail and we still have a reef in the main. This is a perfect example of the reason for my confidence in this crew that Chieftain Racing / Ger has assembled. The guys can handle the boat when we push hard, then make a sober decision to throttle back when breaking the boat becomes a concern.

Not that the throttle is that far off the floorboards.

We are still hitting 28 knots.

With only the staysail up.

P.S. We just pulled out the fractional zero again. Looks like we will be on and off the throttle all night long.

2008-11-18T06:29:00.010Z

I thought I’d be feeling better. I was right.

We changed sails earlier today to the R1, our high-clew reacher. We are sailing in 25 to 40 knots of wind and 8-meter waves.
Surf's up.

Did I mention we changed sails?

Now, that was an adventure.

Almost all the time, downwind, we fly our J4. It's a small jib foresail set on a furler off our staysail halyard. But during our sail change the tack pin broke. That severed the connection between furling unit, sail, and deck. So imagine 30 knots of wind. Imagine the head (top corner) and clew (back corner) of the sail still attached. Imagine the tack (should-be forward bottom corner) whip-slapping the air with a three-kilogram metal furling unit attached to the end of the whip. We're talking violence. As we tried to wrestle the sail to the deck I heard a voice remark,
Boy, this is dangerous . . .

Okay. (Deep breath.) Here goes. I’ve dreaded writing the blog entry on strategy and route to India. I can't do it with a simple screen shot and words. I think I’d need a 20-slide powerpoint deck and live commentary. Crossing the Indian Ocean, Cape Town to Cochin, is a complicated route. It has about five moving parts. Being adaptable and managing risk are key. Let's take a shot at a simple version:

Right now we are sailing on the backside of a low pressure system, as shown in the current position picture. The system is allowing us to fast-dash east, riding the southwest winds in this sector. We will head almost due east and past the scoring gate. For this leg our mid-scoring gate is Longitude 58 E. The boats farthest east will pick up the most points at this mid-leg gate.

Click to enlarge:

Just about the time we arrive at the scoring gate, the wind will shift to the northwest as another low pressure system catches up with us. This system can be seen on the Nov 21 projection below. This will allow us to turn to a northeasterly course, as you see from the red predicted course on the diagrams. We will follow this system for a day and a half as we head towards the prevailing east trade winds that live north of Latitude 30. The green dot at the end of the red line in each screen shot shows the location of the trade winds.

The transition from low pressure-driven northwesterlies to the east trades? That could be rough. I’ll spend the next few days working out the details of how to play the shift from one weather system to the next. Currently, we are too far away and it's too early. I don’t have all the information I need. We’ll stay adaptable.

The easterly trade winds will take us up to the doldrums. The last part of this leg is going to be tricky. The monsoon season is changing off the coast of India, so it’s tough to know whether we will finish in a southwest monsoon or a northeast monsoon. I’m keeping an eye on it (I'm probably not alone) and following the trends. Strategy decisions for that section are ten days away.

In the mean time we have some blistering fast sailing to do.

The Volvo Flu

2008-11-17T05:03:00.003Z

As a fleet, we have been sailing south into a nice westerly.

Last night there was an opportunity to make an aggressive tactical call. I would have preferred to be positioned to the south side (right) of the fleet, but it was a risky call. The move would have involved tacking away from boats within sight of us—all sailing on our same tack. So, instead we played a conservative card to stay with the boats alongside. This fit our pre-race plan, to sail with other boats for some bench-mark testing, but it worked against my maverick streak. I was sure that tacking and moving into the westerly position was the correct move. What to do? Go for the kill or stay with the fleet and test?

Puma and Green Dragon hunted on the right side.

We held and tested.

Puma and Green Dragon gained about 5 miles as a reward.

Grr.

When we woke up this morning we had Telfonica Blue and Ericsson 3 still with us. Testing continued.

Throughout the day the wind built through the high teens and into the low 20’s, a nice day of downwind sailing. We spent most of it with our A4 (the big mast head spinnaker) flying and gauging our performance on the boats around us visually. Testing… testing… testing.

When the wind hit the high 20’s, it was too much for our A4. We switched to the A6. Conclusion, this sail is horrible. Code name it ‘the lemon’. Telefonica Blue and Ericsson 3 sailed out of sight and over the horizon. Testing complete.
This sail has a very narrow sweet spot. No, let me take that back. Anything that narrow does not exist. There is no sweet spot. Our A6 might make a nice tent for somebody, but it's no high performance racing sail.

Each sail, like a golf club, is made for a particular shot. The shot that we want to play is VMG, downwind, lots of wind. The A6 wallows. Then, when you come up to give it power, it goes unstable. We're forced to sail an angle that we don’t want to sail. In the last report since we put this thing up, the fleet has gained between 2 and 5 miles on us.

In the next couple of hours a cold front will pass. We will see winds increasing into the low 30’s with a dramatic wind shift to the southwest. This will turn our trajectory from southeast to east. As a fleet, we will be aimed directly toward our scoring gate, about 1600 miles away. The forecast also shows that ‘the lemon’ will be flying for the next 48 hours. We hope that in the bigger breeze this sail will develop a less bitter version of a sweet spot. We hope.

I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow, emotionally and physically. I’ve developed a cold over the past two days. It’s most likely a reaction to the five immunization shots that I was required to receive, by racing rules, just before we left Cape Town. I have lost my voice and gained a fever. [These symptoms are rife through the fleet: Ed.]

Thanks for allowing me to vent. I can’t let the boys know how sick I feel or how frustrated I am with the lemon. As a team we need to stay positive and keep the boat moving. Emotions are contagious so I’ll keep smiling and encouraging performance and looking for the fastest path to India. Now it’s time for me to go on deck and do some sailing.

Cough.

(Cough.)

Smiles.

Matt out

So We're Off

2008-11-16T03:10:00.006Z

Our race started with a Table Bay 'tour’ and plenty of fanfare for the spectators. At a distance to go of 4,450 miles, we launched toward Chochin, India with a triangle race to show off the fleet before heading for the open ocean.

We completed the triangle and—

And sailed into a hole, a huge hole. In half a mile we went from blast reaching in 20 knots—the breeze funnels around Table Mountain—to sitting, parked, like bumper boats on a pond. If a mountain can be a funneler, a mountain can also be a blocker.

Give it an hour of commotion, with some boats making big gains, and the fleet, in effect, restarted.

After some tense moments, all of us broke free and made it out to sea. Both boat and crew feel more at ease out here. The VO70 was not designed for round-the-buoys racing. As surgical tools go, it's a sledge hammer. But forget that metaphor because everything changes on the ocean. For a Volvo 70 the open ocean is a playground.

In the evening and into the night we sailed upwind in a southerly direction, aiming to position ourselves in a windy system that is filling in from the west. By sailing this direction we will, very soon, be able to put up our big downwind sails and head east in a hurry.

Over the next few days, I'll talk about strategy for the crossing to the subcontinent.

An early highlight of leg two was passing though an area of luminescent algae just after nightfall. It’s almost impossible to describe the vibrance. No one, not even Stu, who has sailed around the world four or five times, had ever seen anything like it; not even close. The ocean was glowing. Looking down you wondered, who turned the lights on? The whitecaps were luminous, bright, whitish-green. It was even blinding and . . .

Not because I'm blind, but I gotta run, A bag of freeze-dried sweet & sour chicken was just placed in my hand. Yep, I'm truly back at sea. I actually missed this.

I can’t believe I said that.

Oh look, there's a spoon in the bag. I embark upon a brave new world.

Matt out

Editor's Note: At just about the time Matt was writing, the VOR office was according Delta Lloyd a "nominal lead" in the fleet. Later, that was adjusted in favor of Telefonica Blue. Obviously, it's early in a long race to read anything into anything, and six hours in, the top 7 were all listed within an eight-mile range on the distance-to-go meter. The fleet was split between a group hugging the African shore and a group working deliberately offshore, all beating into a 17-knot southerly clear of the Cape of Good Hope. Delta Lloyd had adopted a middle course along with Ericcsons 3 and 4 and the two Telefonicas.

There is no accumulated wisdom for this leg, because no one has ever raced Cape Town-Cochin before. A VOR press release cites "tricky winds, tough currents, monsoons, hundreds of small vessels and the threat of pirates." Puma skipper Ken Read says, "I have never entered a race or a leg of a race so confused about how the outcome may turn out."

Grabbing the Sides of the Bed

2008-11-15T15:59:00.002Z

I took a week and a half off from writing to enjoy the sites of Cape Town.

It took that long to recover from Leg One.

Now we're legging out to Cochin, India, through waters where people have sailed before, but never raced. It's easy to wonder, will that be an equalizer, or?

My first five days back on land were disorienting. You’d think that after three weeks of never sleeping properly I’d spend a couple days doing nothing but sleep.

Nope.

I couldn’t sleep. Oh, three hours, maybe, and I'd then wake up grabbing the sides of my bed thinking the bed was shaking or it was going to capsize . . .

It didn't.

I lost five pounds during leg one. That’s huge for me. In Cape Town I ate non-stop. I'd kick off daily with a bowl of corn flakes, half a package of bacon, 4 eggs and 2 slices of toast. Every day. An afternoon snack of french fries, smothered with mayonnaise (I am sailing for a Dutch team after all) and a Häagen-Dazs chocolate shake has been tiding over my favorite-food-cravings of leg one.

We worked steadily, but in a relaxed matter. I spent the first five days slowly bringing the stress level back down to manageable. We had one day off, and only one. In fact, it was the first day we've had off since I joined this team. To take maximum advantage, two friends of mine, Ryan Houston and Stu Malloy, hired a taxi for a tour of the area around Cape Town. If you are ever visiting this wonderful city you absolutely must call our new friend and tour guide, David (+27 078 617 8151). He took us on a tour that included visiting shanty towns, eating fish and chips on the beach, touring two vineyards and visiting an animal park where we were able to interact with zebras, cheetahs, owls and hawks. Most people that know me well know how much I detest cats. I really hate cats. However, being able to see a cheetah up close, petting a cheetah, that was pretty cool.

Photo by Rick Tomlinson/Volvo Ocean Race

Okay, leg two. This is Saturday, and we're on our way. It's 4,450 measured miles from Cape Town to Cochin, a commercial hub in India's southwestern state of Kerala. Cochin is also a place steeped in history that celebrates the holidays of Hindus, Christians and Moslems. In ocean racing terms, we're making some history ourselves. They've never seen the likes of us before.

We had plenty of breeze at first and then:

Extra Extra

Big wind hole early scrambles the fleet leaving Cape Town!

On the other side of that hole we began to settle into the race.

Matt out

Life At The . . .

2008-11-02T23:23:00.002Z

Volvo brands its round-the-world race as "Life at the Extreme". When I reflect on this slogan, now, as a competitor, I realize that there has been a shift in my interpretation. I used to hear "-blah, blah, blah- EXTREME".

"Life at the" sounded like filler, mere words for propping up "the extreme" and conjuring images of boats ripping through waves at 30 knots. Now, 23 days and more than 8000 sailing miles into leg one, I realize that the operative word in this slogan is "Life". Participating in this race is a 9 month lifestyle.

This is our last night on leg one. Tonight will bring an end to our 23rd day of sailing a 70-foot carbon shell from Spain to South Africa, via a scoring gate off Brazil.

What were you were doing on October 11th, the Saturday we left Alicante for Cape Town? This might take a moment. It was a Saturday. Have you placed it yet? How many times have you taken a hot shower, shaved, gone out to dinner, talked to a friend on a phone, been to the gym, gone for a run, sipped a beer, slept eight hours straight, hit the snooze button, or surfed the web? I haven’t done any of these things for 23 days.

These were basic elements of my lifestyle before this race started.

Particularly the snooze button.

Our life on the Delta Lloyd is one dimensional and simple. We are racing a sail boat. That’s all we do. We wear the same clothes every day, so we don’t wonder what to wear, or for that manner, what's clean. We eat one of three flavors of freeze dried food every day. The only decision we make about what to eat is the order. We don’t have a main street full of restaurants, a menu or a refrigerator full of options.

As navigator, I’m not on a watch, so I sleep when I can, typically for about 30 minutes at a time, right here on my nav desk seat. Once a day I’ll climb into a bunk for an hour. In total, I sleep for about 3 or 4 hours a day. I don’t have an alarm clock, I don’t have a bed time, and I can not be late to work. In fact, my commute simply involves sitting up, spinning my legs under the nav table desk, and rubbing my eyes. Today we were talking about how ridiculously stupid we all look with beards. However, I have no idea what mine looks like. I haven’t seen myself in a mirror for 23 days.

I am oblivious to what is going on with the presidential election in the USA, the global market crash, the latest gossip amongst my friends, or the new season's story line of my favorite TV show, Entourage.

Participating in this race is the experience of a life time. This is my "Life at the –blah, blah, blah"

Pure Magic

2008-10-31T13:22:00.009Z

What an epic morning — perhaps one of our best thus far on this adventure. I was I was asleep, dreaming of Cape Town, on my nav station bench when Stu Wilson, dripping wet in his foul weather gear, gave me a wake-up nudge and said, "I think that we should give the fractional Code 0 a try, we just got the knock [wind shift] we've been waiting for." After some quick calculations on the computer I threw on my dry suit, boots and harness. Jumping up on deck and assessing the situation, I agreed with his call. As we completed the sail change the sun had risen on what was a cold, clear, and brisk spring morning down here in the Southern Atlantic ocean. With the new sail flying, the boat lit up. We had no idea that the fractional Code 0 would perform so much better than our A6. The Russians had walloped us over the past 24 hours and now, after seeing the fractional Code 0 in action, we realized that the A6, AKA “the lemon” was to blame. It's quite depressing and bitterly frustrating to be rolled as quickly as we were. But, not knowing sail cross-overs is one of the difficulties with a late-entry program such as ours. But, we are learning.

After a brief turn at trimming the main sail, Stu looked over at me saying, "Matt, its your turn to drive — send it". I smiled, handed off the mainsheet, transferred my harness tether to the wheel and jumped up on the steering platform. For the past couple days we've been sailing downwind true-wind angles. With the fractional Code 0 we could give the boat some heat and sail 110 to 130 TWA, which made for excellent surfing. Like a surfer, we could now ride down waves, execute a bottom turn, head back up the wave, and then ride the same wave over and over again. Did I send it? Oh yes — I pushed the throttle through the floorboards as hard as I could. I was hoot'n and holler'n the entire time. I’ve found that the boat likes it when you talk dirty to her as you’re caning it. Then, as if I couldn't be having anymore fun, this morning became legendary as an albatross pulled up along side. She glided, without a single flap of her wings, only 50 meters away, for about 20 minutes. This is the first albatross that I've ever seen. Overwhelmed with excitement, I realized that this is just about as good as ocean sailing gets.

Safety Lessons

2008-10-31T13:06:00.009Z

Safety is an important cultural element amongst the crew of any Volvo Open 70. Take us, for example:

I am just jumping back into my nav station after spending a rotation on deck of trimming, grinding, and driving. In these conditions, everyone on deck is clipped in, and our harness doubles a manual inflating life jacket that holds a personal EPERB and strobe light. (We convert our life jackets from automatic inflation to manual because these boats are so wet.) Just like a rock climber is frequently saved by her harness, her rope, and her belayer, we use our harnesses to keep us onboard.

Each position on deck requires a different technique for surviving a wave that’s washing over the deck. The trimmer sets his tether up so that it’s short and tight so that he can keep both hands on the sheet. When a wave hits, we lean against the tether and ready ourselves to give the sheet an ease as the boat slows down and the apparent wind angle moves aft. The collision with the wave is intense and the pull on the chest harness practically squeezes the wind out of you sometimes.

When we’re grinding, we clip into a jack line that runs down the middle of the cockpit floor, but there is plenty slack in the six-foot tether. If a wave were to sweep you off of your feet, you’d be washed to the back of the cockpit before the tether pulls tight. When a wave reaches the cockpit, I find that squatting a bit and bear hugging the pedestal with my arms and legs keeps me in-situ.

The wheel has an attachment point (a “synthetic” padeye that’s usually made of Spectra or Dyneema) for the harness at its hub. Driving is an incredibly physical job in tough conditions such as these and my arms are aching from my 45-minute helm session. Trust me, it’s a full bodywork out.

Beyond the basics of clipping in and holding on, the Volvo Ocean Race requires all sailors to attend a safety course in Northern England. This two-day course gave us a compressive demonstration of all our onboard safety equipment and first-aid tools. We shot flares, extinguished fires and practiced CPR. The most eye-opening part of the series of drills included the liferaft, MOB, and abandon-ship training. Their intention was clearly to scare the crap out of everyone. We then suited up in our dry suits and harness/life jackets at a “special pool”. The first exercise was simple; swim around the pool. Jokes were told in a relaxed manner as we flopped around while floating on our backs. Meanwhile the pool started to produce rolling, one-meter waves. “This is a pretty cool pool. I like swimming here.” The jokes kept coming.

After our swimming lesson, we climbed out of the pool and were taught how to deploy our life raft. We then deployed our back flips, cannon balls, and belly-flop skills as we all were instructed back into the pool. Our instructor was not amused with our shenanigans and commanded us to start swimming attached to each other as a group. Then, the waves were turned back on but this time they were twice the size as before. A couple laps later howling wind fans were turned on. It was becoming difficult to swim. After another lap, the valve to the rain jets was opened, and our jokes were replaced by the sound of 11 guys choking and gagging on water. Next, the thunderstorm was activated as the pool lights dimmed and strobe lights and thunder took over. We could no longer even see the sides of the pool! Over a loud speaker we could hear the command, “Get in our life raft.” We searched the pool for the raft, still swimming attached as a group. After a couple minutes of searching we found the raft, got in one by one and pulled the canopy down over our heads to protect us from the rain.

It was pitch black inside. With the sound of the thunder echoing outside and the wind and the rain lashing the canopy, we had to scream to communicate with each other. Amongst the chaos we quickly realized that our raft was flooding. As we learned in the classroom that morning, all life rafts have a hole in the floor so that if the raft is inflated upside down it won’t suck itself to the water as it inflates. We were all crawling over each other to find the valve, as the storm kept raging and our life raft rocked and rolled with the swell.

Finally, we managed to close the vent and congratulated ourselves for completing the drill. We then sat in the raft for 5 minutes before somebody mumbled, ”When do you think that they’ll let us out of here?” Five more minutes transpired. “I don’t think that the drill is over yet,” crooned a cynical observer. Another five minutes passed, and we started to lose track of time. Finally, the drill ended as the lights were turned on, the waves subsided, the water jets were extinguished, and the thunder and strobe lights were turned off.

At the end of the drill our life raft was full of 11 guys that were scared straight.

Because of this, our number-one mission of this race is to stay on the boat and to never, ever get into that life raft.

The Russians Are Coming!

2008-10-29T20:26:00.022Z

SILENCE. The boat swerves a bit as we straddle a wave.
SCREACH, SCREACH, SCREACH: - the grinders haul in the spinnaker sheet. Reverbrations echo throughout the boat, temporarily drowning out almost everything else, save the sound of our hull mashing through the seas.
RUMBLE, RUMBLE, RUMBLE: We careen down the wave. The water rushing past the hull becomes deafening, usurping the SCREACH of the spin sheet. Concentration varies between hard to impossible.
*BOOM* - we crash into the bottom of the wave in front of us. The entire boat shutters violently.
*WOOSH* - several tons of water come crashing over the foredeck and through the cockpit in the form of a wall of water that’s a full meter thick. Spray this is not.

"How'd we go on that wave?" the guys ask.
"Our best shot of the day so far: 30.3 knots," I reply.

(Silence)
"Send it boys, here we go again!" I call.

Two evenings ago, I blogged about the emotional roller coaster of sailing in this race. My objective for today was to avoid Code 10: Terror. Mission accomplished!

At that time, if you recall, we were downwind sailing on port tack flying our big gear. As the wind speed built to the mid 20's, we pealed to our A6, our small fractional spinnaker, and then we put a reef in the mainsail to reduce sail area. But the wind kept building and the waves kept building. So, we had a tough decision to make based on the following facts:

1) Sunset was only 2 hours away.
2) A major boat-handling maneuver in extreme conditions, in the pitch black of night, with our damaged rig and a spinnaker up would cause Code 10: Terror.
3) A cold front with 35-40 knot winds would pass us sometime in the AM hours.
4) The cold front would also bring a 100-degree wind shift, requiring a gybe (remember, so far with our jury rig we have only sailed on port tack, meaning that our starboard shrouds and spreaders were still untested.).
5) We could not be certain that our rig would stand up on starboard tack after a gybe or in a knockdown broach.
6) We had a 70-mile lead on the Russians.
7) The race leaders would be very difficult to keep up with, let alone catch, with our rig handicap.

So, we did what anybody would do in given these factors: we made a plan. We took down our big spinnaker and hoisted a manageable reaching Genoa in its place. This required us to sail a higher wind angle, taking us on an easterly heading while the rest of the fleet continued heading southeast. We also decided that we would wait until daylight to gybe. I spent much time reviewing the weather models and satellite observations from our midnight download and I concluded that the cold front was going to pass us at 9AM, and that we wanted to be set up and sailing for about an hour on starboard tack. At first light — around 7AM — we started restacking the gear to the new windward side. To be overly cautious, we hoisted the J4, our smallest jib, and took down the reaching Genoa. This process took an hour with the full effort of all 10 of us.

It was now time for the moment of truth. We gybed. The rig didn’t tumble. Deep relief! We loaded the mast and rigging by pulling in on the mainsheet. The rig stood: Our repair worked! However, as the engineers at our mast manufacturer told us, we are only safe on starboard tack as long as we don't fly masthead kites. With confidence, we hoisted the A6 - our fractional spinnaker.

With the rig scare averted, we were now heading for the cold front to tackle it head on. With little drama, a brief spell of 40-knot winds, and lots of water, we punched through it and were comfortably sailing yet again. Because we felt confident with our rig and now had a comfortable gap between us and the center of the low, I switched from “survival mode” to “racing mode”. At the 2200 position report we learned that the Russians had closed our lead gap to 25 miles. Time for Code 6: competitive intensity.

An hour later the windspeed dropped to the high teens. OH NO!I feared would happen when we reached the back side of the front! We were wallowing and need the power of our big, masthead spinnaker and our full mainsail. Code 7: Frustration. Given our mast situation, Code 6 was now impossible.

I had faith that we would be saved by the virtue of patience. Since we can't change our sails to suit the wind speed, we needed the wind speed suits our sails. I knew that more wind was coming but so were the Russians! Two hours later the wind built to the mid 20-knot range. We staved off the Russians, who are now only 20 miles behind us. Back to Code 6: Competitive intensity.

*WOOSH* ... "28.7 knots on that one"
Code 5. Fantastical thrill

This race is a rollercoaster!

Congratulations to Ericsson 4 for breaking the 24-hour distance record today. Brilliant work!!

-Matt out

2008-10-28T13:23:00.020Z

The Scale of Heaven and Hell

I’ve devised a scale that describes the emotional spectrum of sailing in the Volvo Ocean Race. The scale is from 0 to 10 and is of increasing levels of “intensity”. It goes like this:

0. Sleep
1. Boredom
2. Zen-like
3. Enjoyable
4. Humorous and fun
5. Fantastical thrill
6. Competitive intensity
7. Frustration
8. Exhaustion
9. Fear
10. Sheer terror and survival

Ideally, cruising through this race in the middle ranges of 3-6, with plenty of 0 thrown in would be the perfect way to race around the world. This is pretty much how our leg has gone so far. However, right now I’m not experiencing these good numbers. Instead, I’m living in Zone 9: Fear. You see, there’s a storm brewing, a very big storm. If you lived along the coast in the southern states of the USA you’d be boarding up your windows and driving your car inland if you saw something this wicked coming your way. Us? We’re sailing towards it right now. You see, the low-pressure system to our south is going to merge with another low-pressure system to the southeast, unifying into a deep depression of 970mb. This system will generate gale-force winds. For us, this storm is a gateway to hell. My job over the next 5 days is to ensure that we don’t fall directly into it (just use it to our best-possible advantage), and that both boat and crew get to Cape Town in one piece.

Given the severity of the storm, we've been preparing for the blow for the past day. Here’s a look at our work list thus far: We’ve tidied up the boat with a bunch of small maintenance jobs. We have organized our stack of gear so that all emergency and repair equipment is ready to deploy if we need it. We’ve added carbon laminate to our damaged jumper spreader….oh, I hope that you haven’t forgotten about our damaged mast. We certainly haven’t! Ever since we completed the repair well over a week ago, we’ve been sailing on port tack. The damaged spreader is on the starboard side of the mast and we haven’t loaded or tested its strength yet. There is an impending gybe in our future that will coincide with a cold front crossing over us as the storm deepens to our south. Talk about trial by fire for our jury-rigged spreader!

Right now, we are in Zone 9. I need to make sure that I don’t put the boat in a location that escalates us to Zone 10. These boats are so powerful that they don’t need a breath of wind over 25 knots to set the ocean on fire. That said, our weather-routing software is much braver than I am! It will seek maximum wind speeds to get us to Cape Town as quickly as possible. To tame the weather-routing software for wind speeds over 25 knots, I told the program that our boatspeed would only be 5 knots. This is not the case in reality, of course, but it manually forces the router to hunt through the weather model forecast to generate routes that keep us in wind speeds under 25 knots. Over the next week, the hot seat (AKA my nav station) will be smoking as I try to balance survival, keeping the boat in one piece, and racing against our competitors. It’s a difficult equation to optimize…but challenges like this are what make being a navigator so invigorating.

But what’s really fascinating is the report from Expedition, our routing software, as I plot our track for arriving in Cape Town. According to Expedition, there are two paths that we can go by, a scary route, and a more sensible route (again, keeping in mind our damaged spreader situation). The surprising bit is that the ETA in Cape Town is the same for both routes, which actually helps simplify my life. At least for now…

This screen shot from Expedition, my routing program, shows the two of the many options that I’m considering for our track to Cape Town. This is a snap shot of the South Atlantic weather on Oct 29th at 900 GMT. The bull's eye in the lower middle section of the frame is the low-pressure storm. The red line represents the scary route, and the black line shows the sensible way to get to Cape Town…you might be surprised that the black route and the red route both arrive in Cape Town at almost the exact same time…. Try and guess which route we'll choose.

-Matt out

Questions Answered

2008-10-27T14:39:00.010Z

I love receiving reader questions, and I typically try to weave these queries into my stories. So, today's entry will be dedicated specifically to answering reader's questions. I'll punch through 3 quick ones and then spend the bulk of this entry addressing Jay Palace's fabulous question on team building. Here we go.

Is the Volvo Ocean Race covered on TV in the USA?
-Yes. Weekly shows will air on PBS and monthly recaps will air on Versus.

Have we thought about building spoons out of carbon?
-Yes we did. However, instead of building new ones we are using the scoops from the sports drink containers.

Where do we get the power to run all of our computing, communication and electronics, and how much power does the system take to run?
-The boat has 2 Volvo Penta Engines, one large and one small. The large one is used for powering the propeller when we are motoring in and out of the harbor, and for pumping hydraulic fluid in the rams for our canting keel. We only use this large engine for the quick, 80-degree, full side-to-side cants when we tack or gybe. We also have an electric pump for slower and smaller cant adjustments to the keel position. The small Volvo Penta engine runs our watermaker and a very big alternator that charges our 24-volt DC power-supply system. We make water and charge our batteries for an hour 3 times per day. Our entire electrical system pulls about 12 Amps in normal operation.

And now for the big question of the day:

“Did you spend any time thinking about how to quickly bond with the guys on the team? You were the last addition, right? What was that like? And... as the navigator, the team looks to you for an intensely important part of the game.... how does that all impact your "on-boarding" process? And... lastly, did your skipper Ger O'Rourke do or say anything to help you? -JAY PALACE

-I love this question. I've been a part of two Americas Cup teams and now, one Volvo Ocean Race team. Not one of these teams organized strategic team-building exercises. After my two Americas Cup campaigns I went back to school for my MBA at the University of Michigan, where teaching leadership and team building philosophies is a core part of the curriculum. Considering how mission critical it is to develop a 'high performing team' at the VOR and AC level, I'm shocked that teams spend so little time working with external consultants to implement practices and techniques that have been proven [successful] at the executive level within corporations. Most professional sailing teams, you might be surprised to find out, develop their team dynamics in a sort of haphazard, organic way. This strategy, or should I say 'lack thereof', can sometimes have disastrous consequences. I have seen several Americas Cup and VOR teams implode, despite having all of the necessary equipment, funding, and raw human talent to be champion-level competitors.

Despite my late addition to the Delta Lloyd team, I've already started to spearhead team development discussions while we've been sailing on Leg 1. The most important discussion that I've lead is to establish, at a conscious level, self-awareness of individual attitude. I believe that everyone is either on a virtuous or a vicious cycle at any [given] moment. Moreover, both states of mind are highly contagious to other teammates, particularly in the intense and stressful environment of racing Volvo 70's around the world.

To address Jay's second question about my personal integration into the team, I can admit that it was a difficult process for me. On the day that I arrived, I was not introduced to the team nor did I have any sort of orientation. For the first time in a very long time I was sailing with an entirely new group of people, whom I didn't know at all. The day that I flew into Alicante, from San Francisco, everyone was already working on the boat when the taxi dropped me off. I set down my bags and then headed up to the boat to develop a work list for [the] navigation system. I knew that a strategy of being quiet and humble would be my best initial strategy.

The reality is that I'm gregarious and feel comfortable “leading the charge.” I decided to leave my reputation with the team to my performance during the in-port race series. Right up until the in-port race, I deferred all planning activates to the shore-side management. Even though no one had given me a proper initial introduction to the team, I did not attempt to over compensate for this by reciting my “resume” in an effort to promote myself or [my] experience. Then, during the inshore race in Alicante, I took the reins as my job description entails. As soon as we pushed off of the dock, amongst all of the fanfare that goes along with a “show” at this level, I immediately called everyone into the cockpit and led a meeting to lay out the [game] plan for our race day. This was the first time the sailing team was alone, together, to come together as a group. During the in-port series I led the team in the typical tactician/strategist role.

The in-port race turned into a great team-building day for us, and it also led to the crew's trust in me as the team's navigator and leader. It's important for the crew to trust their navigator, particularly when you wake them up on their off-watch to gybe and restack the boat. Trust and confidence is a paramount relationship amongst all levels of a Volvo Ocean Race crew, and I can happily report that we are on the virtuous path.

Matt out

Controlling a Beast

2008-10-25T00:32:00.008+01:00

Going south, going south, and I just finished my turn at the wheel. Warm, sunny, 21 knots of breeze with long, rolling waves and we are making 16 knots on an upwind reach. The Volvo 70 is an animal in these conditions, and there is power to burn. You feel like you are controlling a beast. It's a great feeling.

Questions came in about our trajectory to Cape Town, and I understand if it's puzzling.

You might wonder why we are 60 miles off the coast of South America after leaving Europe for South Africa. Why are we on the "wrong" side of the South Atlantic?

I could ask myself the same question as I look at our Velocity Made on Course (the component/vector of our overall speed that is taking us towards Cape Town) and I see 1.2 knots on the display. Geez. We're going 16 knots through the water, yielding 1.2 knots toward the finish, with 3300 miles to go? Why not just stop in Rio for a burger? (Freshly ground sirloin cooked medium with cheddar cheese, avocado, tomato, grilled onions and a soft toasted sesame seed bun, basket of fries, hot fudge mint malt . . .

Sorry, where was I?

Well, the answer is, we're on this route because of the South Atlantic High Pressure Zone. It's in the way, between us and Cape Town. There's little or no wind at the center of the High, so it's faster to sail around it than through it. We're out here for another 12 days, probably, with our familiar three varieties of freeze-dried feasts and zero remaining spoons.

The High, in general, hangs out between South America and Africa at about 20 degrees South Latitude. Straightlining toward Cape Town, we'd sail into the High and slow down big time. And when we finally broke out on the eastern side of the High we would be faced with gale force headwinds for the last several hundred miles to the finish. That would be wrong twice. Thus we are chillin’ like villains over here on the sunny coast of Brazil. Our winds here are the easterly trades that flow across the top of the High, making our assault south very quick.

Once we get down to about 25 or 30 degrees South Latitude we will turn and burn to Cape Town. (We are currently at 9 S, Rio is at 23 S and Cape Town is at 35 S, with each degree of latitude being 60 miles.) It is reasonable to hope to ride a southern ocean low pressure system after we turn. The weather patterns along that late portion of the route are perfect for breaking 24-hour records. We should be able to stack up a few 500+ mile days.

Here's a screen shot from Expedition, my routing software, showing our expected path (red line) based on the 10-day GFS model and a snap shot of the weather model forecast for Oct 29th. The green dot in the middle of the screen along the red path is where we should be on the 29th. The blue lines represent MSL pressure contours. To the north of the red line is the South Atlantic High. To the southwest of Cape Town is the low pressure system we aim to latch onto.

Gives me itchy fingers. Click for the large view. Matt out

Neptune Yes, Spoons No

2008-10-24T00:42:00.004+01:00

It's a tough day to write a blog entry. My keyboard and I are bouncing out of synch.

I zig.

It zags.

The boat's motion is pretty violent. We are blast-reaching toward Fernando de Neronha, our scoring gate, and making 17 knots.

Early this morning we crossed the equator and—every bit as reliable as Santa on Christmas— King Neptune boarded us at 10 am. A clever fellow, Neptune. He timed his arrival to coincide with a change of watch and, not to disturb us unnecessarily, disguised himself to resemble our crewman Johnnie Portman. (Johnnie crossed the equator in the previous race and so was not a rookie to receive the traditional ceremonial hazing.) I was a rookie, so there I was, and there was Neptune with a beard, crown and cape, trident in hand.

One by one, we first-timers were punished for our sins.

Sins that included, for example, coming onto watch late, leaving personal gear lying around the interior, or hoarding candy bars. I was punished for my persistence in maintaining our boat's heading. Neptune was not happy. He told the crew: "Matt pokes his head up on deck to tell the guys, 'We're sailing two degrees too low, the course is 240.' Fifteen minutes later it's, 'We're three degrees too high; the course is 240.' And fifteen minutes after that, 'The course is still 240, can you press it up 2 degrees?' "

Apparently, after thirteen days, this gets annoying. Who would have thought?

My punishment was to sing the Star Spangled Banner to the crew. Then a ladle of "brew" was dumped on each rookie's head. The "brew" was made from seawater and freeze-dried detritus that had been left to fester below in the heat of the doldrums for the past couple of days.

It was a great way to start the day and, actually, I mean that.

Getting back to what we're here for: Today, due to our easterly position on the fleet, we launched past the Russians and have left them over 40 miles in our wake. As I write, Ericsson 3 is eight miles in front and to leeward. We are closing quickly. We have only 60 miles of runway to Fernando, however. We hope we can catch them before we pass the scoring gate.

P.S. For those of you who are keeping track of our 'spoon count', Stu broke our last one today.

Editor's note: One of Matt's dedicated readers suggests that we offer further reading on the traditional transformation from Pollywog to Shellback at the crossing of the equator. Here's a wikipedia link.

Deliriously Tired

2008-10-22T05:55:00.008+01:00

"Kimball, this might need a big edit, I'm dileriously tired ... "

Well, after we respelled deliriously, you were good, Matt. Get some sleep, will ya . . .

"Sailing" in the doldrums is agony. For three days we've been wallowing along at three knots of boat speed, with only the occasional puff from a cloud to boost us along.

Earlier today everyone on the boat lost their sense of humor.

Was bored of boredom.

Desperately wanted to be sailing again.

To twist the knife deeper, the race schedules showed that Green Dragon, Puma and Eriksson 4 had escaped the doldrums and were were already blasting away toward the scoring gate at Fernando, some 600 miles away.

I'm not sure. Were we more envious that they were winning? Or were we more envious that they were sailing and we were stuck?

This evening, our metamorphosis began.

A family of whales swam past, during dinner. Almost at the same moment the wind gently started to blow and the sun set, beautifully. A joke was told, a chuckle ensued and smiles returned.

After four hours of steadily building breeze we entered a wall of isolated squalls marking the southern boundary of the doldrums. It seemed that we had one more cloud to navigate ourselves around and we'd be clear to sail towards the scoring gate in the trade winds. However, due to a bad approach angle we were sucked into the squall. All hands jumped up on deck for a quick tack and a sail change from our masthead zero to our large reaching genoa. Then, just as we were cleaning up from the maneuvers, a gentle rain escalated into a downpour. In jubilation at the prospect of a fresh water 'shower' someone yelled
"hurry, get the soap". The dish soap came up on deck and we all jumped at the chance for a shower before the rain had a chance to subside.

Amongst the commotion of passing the soap around, and a joking accusation that Bert dropped the soap on purpose, we heard a heckling laughter coming from the companionway. It was our media crew, Sander, with his night vision video camera. The stern camera that recorded our spreader break the other night had been activated by Sander again. Sometimes we forget that our boat is wired with cameras like the set of Big Brother. Sander claims that he is going to make a fortune when we get to Cape Town with his video. I'm not sure if his intent is to blackmail us or to go internet-live with the website
www.dutchsailorsshower.com.

Time will tell, In the meantime we have a couple
boats to pass on our way to the scoring gate at Fernando.

And . . .

Recalling our spreader break and my accounts over the last couple of days, here is a pic of (do I have to call him by his real name?) Gerd-Jan Poortman up the rig to effect a brilliant repair.

And this is the repair.

Images by Sander Pluijm/Team Delta Lloyd/Volvo Ocean Race

Back to the Big Code Zero

2008-10-20T22:06:00.003+01:00

We're off again after one of the most incredible on-the-water repairs I've ever seen. Martin and Johnnie invented a fantastic system for fixing our top mast jumper. They saved leg one.

Roller coaster emotions?

We were in an intense duel with the rest of the fleet.

We broke our rig and it was all over.

We're back in the race.

The events of last night—breaking our jumper—were all recorded in high def video thanks to a 'crash button' in the companionway. If there is an event on deck, a crew member can hit the button and the previous two minutes and the next 6 minutes of action are stored in our stern-mounted camera. Last night's scene is
something to watch. We are uploading the video to Volvo Race HQ as I type.

We see the spreader falling, then hitting the side deck just inches behind Ryan, the trimmer, to leeward. It bounces back high, passes between Stu and me (we were grinding across from each other on the rear pedestal), then glances off my back and hits the deck again, then lands in the very back of the boat. Incredibly, just as the spreader failed, I rotated 90 degrees and took a halfstep forward. I have no recollection of taking the step or being hit, but it's all on film. It's a miracle that none of us took a direct hit. We were all standing in a five-foot circle and the spreader cracked the deck and the self-tailer of one winch when it came down between us.

We might claim to be pretty tough, but we're softer than the boat.

Now we are happy to be sailing at full capacity again. We can worry about the new problem de jour; We are running out of spoons. We started with ten. We're down to two.

Maybe Martin and Johnnie can make us some.

Matt out

Bounced Off Me

2008-10-20T17:58:00.005+01:00

The doldrums have scrambled the Volvo Ocean Race fleet amidst calms, squalls, and black clouds. Green Dragon's stealth move carried her to the front of the fleet, but today that lead is dwindling. And life aboard Delta Lloyd got very complicated, very quickly.

Last night we attempted a sail change to our Mast Head Code O foresail. It was pitch black and we had unknowingly fouled a halyard around the leeward upper jumper spreader.

As we attempted to get the halyard onto its halyard lock we heard a BANG. A second later a bolt hit the deck. A second later, something big crashed down. The jumper. It had broken away from the rig. It fell 90 feet. Fortunately it bounced off the deck a couple times before it bounced off me.

In a state of shock I chased the thing down ("we might need that") as it headed for the back of the boat and I nabbed it about half a meter from the transom. Our collective state of mind was disbelief. We were all thinking, “Our leg is over, we broke the rig.”

We took down the mast-head code zero and put up a fractional code zero to unload the top of the rig. At this point, we were the southern-most boat in the fleet, a position we had worked hard for two days to gain. Now we're slow and the fleet is pulling bearing on us to the west. For sure, they have their big code zero’s on while we are sailing with a fractional. I feel absolutely gutted.

However.

Marti Watts, our rigger/mast expert, must be just about the most positive-minded and resilient problem solver we could ever hope to have on board. While I took a nap and worked on a weather solution to tiptoe through the doldrums, he worked through the night on a problem that is really difficult. Consider: It takes a specialized part to replace the end fittings that broke. They aren’t parts that we have onboard as spares, and . . .

I was just up on deck to see how things are progressing, and it looks like a fabulous solution. Martin has built a ‘bracket’ to sandwich the spreader and to butt up against the mast. He has a plan for using the fittings that are already on the mast, some ratchet straps, and the compression forces from the shroud to hold it all together. Then we can sail on starboard tack with more than a reef in the main and a fractional foresail. If he can pull off this repair I am going to be astounded. He is one talented mast guru.

In an earlier missive that now seems moot, Matt wrote about the living conditions aboard Delta Lloyd in the Doldrums. For example:

The hotseat is HOT today and don’t mean metaphorically. I am sitting in a sauna. It is well over 100 degrees down below. My only option for cooling myself is pointing the small fan at my nav desk directly at my head while drinking water with sports drink powder added. The water is desalinated from the sea, which is hot as well. Neither seems to be of very much help.

Matt out

Shakeup Coming?

2008-10-18T17:40:00.004+01:00

My parents and sister sent an email this morning wishing me a Happy Birthday. They asked “What flavor birthday cake will you have on board? Can they make that in freeze dried? If not, will anything else take the place of your favorite Baskin Robbins mint chocolate chip ice cream cake log?”

No.

I would do anything for a Baskin Robbins ice cream cake log roll right now.

Someone reading this blog should, immediately, go out to get one and write me a detailed description so that I can live vicariously. Since we left Alicante we’ve been eating freeze-drieds. We have three (three) varieties: Chili con Carne, Sweet and Sour Chicken, Chicken Tikka with Rice. We have three servings of each per day. On Wednesday, spaghetti bolognaise popped up in the daily food bag and there was absolute euphoria on board, having a new flavor. The crew sang Happy Birthday to me early this morning, which was followed up with a special treat: Freeze dried custard with blue berries.Tasty but not quite up to par with a nice thick slice of, you know.

Meanwhile, there's a race going on. We are just about to enter the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, otherwise known as the Doldrums. This is an area between the Northern and Southern hemisphere’s easterly trade winds. It is an area known for light winds, squalls and, generally, difficult sailing.

Right now we are headed right for a very large convection cell. This cloud is about 75 miles in diameter and depicted in the screen shot, 250 miles to our southeast: The cell is moving to the west at just about the same speed that we are traveling south, and for now it is building. By evening, however, the daytime heat convection that is fueling its growth should be reduced and the moist air, suspended at high altitudes, will start to fall. The moisture in the cloud will condense into rain. This will yield winds that are sort of helicopterish; that is, in the middle of the cloud the wind will be falling out of the sky; towards the edges the winds will radiate outwards.

The fleet should be positioned to the North of the cell when it passes. This means that the northeasterly gradient wind will be canceled by the southerly wind that the cloud produces. Or, perhaps, the cloud could build so much pressue that we will be sailing upwind in a southerly as it passes. I’m waiting for the 1800 GMT and 0000 GMT weather forecasts to see how this cell moves and changes.

How does this play into our 24-hour strategy?

It is impossible to get in front of the cell, so our escape back into the easterly gradient winds is to go east when the cell arrives; the new wind will fill from there. Fortunately we have a great eastward position on the fleet and are bow forward of everyone except Puma and Ericsson 4. I think there will be a big shake up in the leader board after this cell passes.

Matt out

Records, Leverage, Mint Chocolate Chip

2008-10-17T18:54:00.010+01:00

I don't know about you, but I keep track of my personal 'speed' records. I have all sorts.

My top instantaneous speed on my road bicycle is 53 mph. My endurance solo speed record in a car goes back to a drive from Michigan to California a couple years ago: I did one stretch from Ann Arbor to Wyoming, 1300 miles, in 16 hours including gas fill ups and food stops.

Yesterday was another day for personal records. We sailed a long gybe, heading west away from the African coast, and covered 255 miles in 12 hours. Even more impressive; we were VMG-running (optimizing our angle for downwind gains. not straight-line speed). I'm sure this pace will be repeated over and over again over the next 9 months, but nonetheless, it was another fantastic night of sailing and a new personal best.

The next tactical decision in this race is picking a line through the doldrums, a region of confused winds that hover around 10 degrees north latitude at this time of year. Right now we are tracking west at 17 degrees north, toward the Verde Islands. We have the Green Dragon and the Russians several miles abeam to the north. I've positioned us here to leeward for a reason.

Sander Pluijm/Team Delta Lloyd/Volvo Ocean Race

There is a tropical wave passing to our south. This tropical wave will bring us a big right shift when it comes through, from the 35 degree wind direction we have now to probably 90 degrees. It should happen within the next 10 hours. Even more critical is how the shift will come to us. The shift is moving up from the south, meaning we should get it first.

It took two extra gybes in the middle of last night to set this up, and there is potential for big gains if the scenario plays out.

Once we get going south, we have to pick a line through the doldrums. While it's a difficult call to make now, we should cross through them at around 30 west longitude. It's going to be a restless night in the hot seat.

Editor's note: This is the sort of pressure that could make a man feel a year older overnight. Or perhaps it's as sister Caroline writes:

"The big question for Matthew Gregory on October 18th is: What flavor birthday cake will you have on board? Can they make that in freeze-dried form? If not, can anything else take the place of your favorite Baskin Robbins mint chocolate chip ice cream cake?

Inquiring minds want to know...and we wish you a very
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Caroline, Mom and Dad"

SSBs? Sextants? Slide Rules?

2008-10-16T23:47:00.021+01:00

I've been asked what I'm using in the way of onboard
computer, software and communication technologies. This post is for the tech-heads out there. You know who you are.

Computers? We have five of'em.

Navigation Station: There are 2 Panasonic Toughbook CF-52 computers in my nav station. I interface both of them through a USB mouse and keyboard. On the left-side machine I run Expedition software (www.iexpedition.org) exclusively. Expedition is my software of choice for performance analysis, navigation, weather routing and competitor tracking. The right-side computer is configured for messaging, writing this blog, reviewing weather charts and satellite imagery, refining sail charts, logging sail hour usage, and interfacing the media desk. I also run Expedition in the background on the right-side computer. Left and right are tied together via our onboard network. In case of a failure, the computers are set up identically, making either capable of running the entire system.

Media desk: 2 Apple computers. This is an incredible system that is provided by Volvo. The desk is a complete IT system that controls our onboard cameras and enables our media man, Sander, to edit video and audio. It controls our satellite broadband connection and allows me to download our weather packages from Volvo. The physical size of the 'box' that contains this hardware is 2 x 1 x .2 meters. One of the Mac books is embedded in the media desk and controls the media system. The other sits on top of the media desk for Sander to edit video and to interface the Media Desk.

The 'data computer': This is a custom piece of Volvo-provided hardware that's about the size of a brick. This computer interfaces an output from our instrument system to send all of our boat's data to Race HQ, for monitoring and for competitor tracking on the event website volvooceanrace.org.

Instruments: We are running a new B&G H3000 processor in the boat's legacy H2000 infrastructure. We have 2 GPS sources that are immediately swappable as inputs into the B&G system. In case of a B&G system failure, a GPS NMEA feed is available to either computer via a simple software switch. Thus if we lose our instruments, my navigation capabilities are not affected. We have redundant boat speed, wind wands and heading sources that can be exchanged by a series of switches on our instrument panel.

Communication: Thrane & Thrane, a partner of the Volvo Ocean Race, supplied each boat with an extensive communication system that includes the following hardware::

2 Sat C's:
One is a messaging terminal. Through Easy Mail software on my right computer I can send or receive messages from other boats or race HQ. The other Sat C specifically sends data from our 'Volvo' data computer to Race HQ for tracing, safety management and use for online spectating on the event web site. Both are interfaced to our GPS system and capable of sending distress signals at the push of a button.

VHF and SSB
A you'd expect we monitor channel 16 on the VHF. If all goes well, I won't need our SSB and will probably never power it on.

I'm new school; I don't know how SSB's, sextants or slide rules work.

Fleet 500:
This is our broadband satellite communication system. We use it to download weather data and to send HD video, photos and audio clips back to Volvo. Daily, we push about 350 MB through its pipe. It also acts as our alternate sat phone option.

Fleet 33:
This is our primary satellite phone communication tool. It also serves as a data backup in case of a Fleet 500 failure.

Handhelds:
We carry hand held VHF, Iridium sat phone and GPS on board for use in emergency. Also every crew member has been issued a personal GPS-enabled EPIRB.

Gosh, I hope that covers it.

Matt out

Editor's note: Puma grabbed the lead today and has been running an indicated 20 miles or so ahead of Ericssons 4 and 3. According to the technology, Matt's hopes of yesterday, to leverage into fourth ahead of Green Dragons, has come up short, but only by 15-16 miles. The gain was big. Team Russia skipper Andreas Hanakamp writes, "No real passing lanes so far, except for Delta Lloyd. They played the Capes of Africa perfectly and gained with every move."

Volvo interviewed Matt about setting up for the doldrums. You can find the link if you CLICK HERE.

Up Another Notch?

2008-10-16T00:52:00.010+01:00

Another upbeat day for Team Delta Lloyd. We passed Telefonica Negro in the dawn hours and moved up to fifth.

Next target, the Green Dragon.

Right now, 90 miles of leverage separate these two boats, but their lead over us is only 10 miles. We are in a race to the 1018 isobar line, and I did my best to help with that, during my time at the wheel.

North of the 1018 line we have 15-18 knots of wind; to the south there is 20+. The fleet spent today's daylight hours north of 1018 (a circulation around the high that is centered to our north west), but we are just about to cross into the breeze; Green Dragon is 100 miles above it. That gives us a chance to move up another notch on the leader board. Puma and Ericsson meanwhile are doing well in front of us and continue to set a quick pace for the rest of the fleet.

Expect Delta Lloyd to continue to sail down the coast of the Western Sahara tonight on port tack. In the early morning we'll be banging the beach. Then we'll gybe back to starboard and head west. The big strategic decision that I need to make tonight and tomorrow morning is whether to take one more short hitch south. The alternative is to strike out westward on the trade winds.

I'll let you know when I know. Take a look below.

Matt out.

Editor's note: Delta Lloyd is the former ABN AMRO ONE, winner of the last Volvo Ocean Race. Skipper Ger O'Rourke has this to say today: "I am excited to say that "Betty," the only grandfathered boat in the fleet, is holding the pack, and as well as enjoying the race, I enjoy the challenge of this project—the first generation, low budget campaign—and taking on the big budget campaigns. The next-smallest is four times our budget and the largest is 20 times ours. I hope this brings more first and second generation boats into the race in 2011."

Twenty Somethings

2008-10-15T03:29:00.007+01:00

I am so ecstatic about how our day has gone, it's hard to know where to start. I've just come down to the nav station from some incredible sailing.

Wind speed: 20 something
Boat speed: 20 something
Sky: Clear
Temperature: Warm
Moon: Full and bright
Smiles: All around.

When our morning started, we were sitting in 7th place with quite a bit of ground to make up on the boats in front. They were bunched together about 70 miles ahead of us. Because this group was all in sight of each other, and preoccupied with each other, we had a great opportunity to sail our own race.

We started the day on starboard tack in about 12 knots of wind. Since we were anticipating a left shift in the breeze, we took the opportunity to gybe away from the pack and gain some leverage.

We interrupt this dialogue for a small tutorial:

The game of sailing is like climbing a ladder. If you are on the same rung as another guy, you are even. Wind shifts are the equivalent of tilting the ladder, or rotating it. If a wind shift moves you up a rung, you are gaining. If the ladder rotates and rungs pass you by and you drop to a lower rung, you are losing.

Narrow ladder/wide ladder: If you are close to the competition and on the same rung (on a narrow ladder), you have little leverage and wind shifts have little impact. If you are on a wide ladder at opposite ends of a rung, small shifts make for significant gains and losses. Managing leverage is a key to effective strategy.

Back to the game we played today:

Having anticipated a shift of the ladder rungs, we decided to
increase our leverage and gybe. After about an hour, our competition gybed as well. As we hoped, the wind shifted our way, we moved up the ladder rungs, 'rung the register' and gybed back toward the competition. In the process we crossed the Russians and made a big gain on the leaders.

To our surprise the group matched our gybe and positioned themselves just to windward and ahead of us. We were all heading west on starboard tack again.

This was fantastic news for us. We had the opportunity to make another gybe maneuver to 'lever up' yet again. Some wind pressure looked to be building along the African coast later in the day, so once again we broke away.

The rest of the fleet followed suit, thirty minutes later.

We were in a drag race to the coast of Africa, where we hoped to
capitalize on the confluence of stronger gradient/a left shift/a
late afternoon seabreeze.

As we gybed back to starboard we found ourselves in
a building breeze and it was shifting left. Oh, baby. Puma and
Ericsson 4 were the only other boats to carry on port for as long as we did, and once we gybed back to starboard, the fleet was in the position we had hoped for. As we extended on starboard, the breeze built to 18, then 20, then 25.

We had our big gear up: a full main, an A4 (our biggest downwind runner) and a staysail. We have been tearing a hole in the ocean for the past 7 hours. The best part is that the boats to our north are not in as much wind as Puma, Ericsson 4, and us. Furthermore, those boats have to either navigate their way all the way around the Canary Islands (where there is less wind) or go through them. Puma, Ericsson 4 and our boat are all passing between Africa and Lanzarote with the prospect of holding the maximum breeze.

I'm willing to hope for some great news to report from the 'hot seat' tomorrow. Later in the week I'll respond to reader questions that revolve around detailing our on board computing, communication, software and technology set up. Keep sending in your questions to my editors at SAIL Magazine, and I'll try to get to all of them.

Matt Gregory, from the nav station of Delta Lloyd

Editor's note: Volvo Ocean Race rules prevent Matt from having access to the internet, so his dispatches are routed through the VOR Duty Officer, then posted at Sail West. That is, Matt can't get to the internet, so he can't post his own blogs. But, since none of the other navigators in the race can get to the internet, he feels secure in writing whatever he wants. I will cheerfully forward your comments to the boat, and if you prefer you can ask questions at blog@gregorysports.com, and I will forward those.

It's a kick to be part of the adventure—Kimball

P.S. Things indeed went well for Delta Lloyd in this interval. While Green Dragon has chosen the Canaries passage for its 12-hour stealth mode, we see some changes in position, per below:

PUMA Racing Team USA (Ken Read/USA) DTF 5436
Ericsson 4 SWE (Torben Grael/BRA) DTL 2nm
Ericsson 3 SWE (Anders Lewander/SWE) DTL 37nm
Delta Lloyd IRL (Ger O'Rourke/IRL) DTL 67nm
Team Russia RUS (Andreas Hanakamp/AUT) DTL 89nm
Telefónica Black ESP (Fernando Echávarri/ESP) DTL 90nm
Telefónica Blue ESP (Bouwe Bekking/NED) DTL 107nm
Green Dragon IRL/CHN (Ian Walker/GBR) StealthPlay

Spotlights and Leverage

2008-10-13T22:57:00.008+01:00

“Hello, boat with the spotlight following us. This is the Volvo Ocean Race raceboat Delta Lloyd. It’s a great night to be out sailing, isn’t it?”

Thus the first of our escorts in the Atlantic . . .

Leaving the Strait of Gibraltar we put up our largest downwind spinnaker and headed south along the coast of Morocco. Due to the angle of the wind we could sail for only about an hour before we had to gybe and head in a more westerly direction. Just after the gybe, a black stealth boat, with no lights at all, came out of nowhere, set up close alongside, and lit us up with a massive spot light.

The guys on deck were a bit startled, as you might expect. They called me up from the nav station, and right away I knew it was the Moroccan navy.

Morocco maintains an exclusion zone on their northwest coast. During our Navigator’s Briefing before the start, Volvo Race Management warned us about the possibility of ‘harassment.’ The discussion during our briefing included polling the teams to perhaps make this region a restricted mark of the course. The vote was no, and since this region was not restricted I had decided to take a chance. Crossing through a corner of the zone saved about four miles of sailing distance, but yes we were taking a chance. This chance.

So there we were, sailing along at a nice pace in the middle of the night, blinded by spotlights and scared now that we might be stopped for a search. Finally, over a loudspeaker we heard a word in some other language.

The command was repeated.

And repeated.

“They told us to stop,” one of our guys aid. My retort was, “Stop? How do we stop? Besides, we can’t understand what they are asking us to do. Stay on target speed and true wind angle. I’m getting on the radio.”

I ran below, grabbed our handheld and came back on deck. Over Channel 16 I said, in an effort to shower them with kindness, “Hello, boat with the light that is following us. This is the Volvo Ocean Race raceboat Delta Lloyd. It’s a great night to be out sailing, isn’t it?”

Their reply: They turned their spot light to strobe mode.

“Great, we're going to jail," one of our guys joked. "This is not how I expected leg one to turn out.” I’m not even sure who said it. We were blinded by the light, all of us. After some nervous laughter all around, another guy said, “We’re not stopping; keep going.” We sailed on, with the stealth boat just 15 meters away. Add five minutes of stress and the stealth boat suddenly switched off all lights and vanished as quickly as it had come.

Escort Two: We started our day surrounded by about 50 dolphins. If having one dolphin swim along with a boat is considered good luck to sailors, then our luck was spilling over. I went down to the nav station, touched the teak strip along the edge of my nav desk—to add to the string of superstitions—and got to work. As it turned out, we had a very good day! We have been playing the shifts and we've managed to leverage ourselves to leeward of the lead pack. In addition to gaining that strategic leverage (we hope to cash it in over the next 48 hours), we have, in general, been sailing in more wind than the competition.

By gybing on a couple of shifts, and by staying in better wind, we have gained all day long.

Thank you dolphin-friends. I hope we’ll have breakfast together again tomorrow. Until then, touch wood.

And as for readers: At bottom you will find a screen shot from my computer. It shows a high pressure ridge (the blue rings) building to the northwest of us. This will dominate the weather scenario and send us southwest in northerly winds until we reach the easterly trade winds to the south of the screen shot.

Matt Gregory from the nav station of Delta Lloyd

Which Way To Go?

2008-10-13T05:48:00.006+01:00

I't's a nostalgic moment. I'm down in the nav station of the Delta Lloyd analyzing the latest weather models and listening to Bob Dylan.

A favorite memory from my college sailing days is driving in the middle of the night back to the University of Michigan from regattas at the Naval Academy and listening to Dylan with my best friends. During my Junior year, in 1997-98, our discussions in the van revolved around the latest news from the Volvo Ocean Race. Dylan was background.

After a busy first-24 hours the reality of this race is sinking in ...

And what a crazy 24 hours it has been. As I wrote in my last post we had a great sail out of Alicante, blasting along at 28 knots. At the click of a finger we put 140 miles between ourselves and the mayhem of the starting-line spectator fleet.

Then in a single instant we sailed into a huge hole of no wind.

We tried to gybe to escape but we were trapped.

Even worse, the rest of the fleet squeaked ahead and sailed off onto the horizon.

This was not the way we wanted to start this leg. However, the Mediterranean is a tricky place to sail. As I write, the guys ahead of us are sitting in a parking lot without wind. We are bringing the wind with us, sailing at 12 knots, and closing the gap. When we clear the Med for the Atlantic the wind will be variable. Very. The navigators on all of the boats are definitely in the hot seat as we try to find our way south to the trade winds.

There certainly has been a lot of head scratching today, trying to decide where to go. But there are already many other story lines from life onboard. Today we performed a surgery onboard—to our media station.

Said media station is provided by the race organizers and is a vital communications link to the Volvo Race HQ. Not only does it send photos and video to race fans, but it is also the portal that allows me to access weather data. In the midst of the frustration of being stuck without wind and having the pressure of nine guys asking me, "where is the wind going to fill," our media desk stopped functioning.

Right away I called on our satellite phone for technical help from Race HQ. Twenty minutes later, our surgery began. Parts and pieces were everywhere.

Sander, our media man, and I put on our head lamps and started to dig into the brains of the media station. Our search ended with a blown fuse. We replaced the 5 Amp fuse with a 10 Amp fuse and once again we were online.

It's time to log off, the guys are asking 'which way to go'

My next report will come from the Atlantic Ocean . . .

Editor's note, this line arrived later:

We have some catching up to do . . . finally made it out of the med . . . that was brutal!

Matt Gregory, from the nav station of Delta Lloyd

Highs To Lows

2008-10-11T15:15:00.011+01:00

Into the Med, headed for Gibraltar, headed for the Atlantic, headed for Cape Town. A 6,500 mile race and that's only leg one.

And what a send off.

We shook hands with the King of Spain and the Royal Family and left for the start line with Rage Against the Machine’s Bomb Track raging over our heads.

Carlos Sastre, Tour de France winner this year, joined us on board for the parade to the start. Interesting to hear his opinions on Lance Armstrong’s return to pro cycling, but this is no time to lose focus on the Volvo Ocean Race . . .

Because we are in it now for sure. Next goal: Clear the Med for the Atlantic. We are looking at 25-30 knots of wind, so we’re putting quick miles between ourselves and Alicante as we make for Gibraltar.

Delta Lloyd leaving Alicante: Photo by Rick Tomlinson/Volvo Ocean Race

The weather is the story for the next 36 hours. It has been windy, really windy. The night before the start, UB40 was supposed to play on stage, but the concert was canceled because the race organizers thought the stage would blow over during the show. Looking ahead, the big obstacle is a break-off low pressure system (the main low is out in the ocean to the west of Gibraltar) that may materialize and situate itself just to the east of the straights. This could turn very tricky late tonight. Or, it could fade and leave us a simple ‘point and shoot’ straight out of the Med.

Better not count on that.

The escort frigate turned back two hours after the start. No more photographers. No more escorts, at least until the Strait of Gibraltar. Delta Lloyd is pointing south with the speedo pegged at 28 knots.

This boat has legs!

Matt Gregory, from the nav station of Delta Lloyd

Editor's note: At SAIL, we may be adding images and notes as they become available from race organizers. It's early in the race and early in our process of helping Matt put this blog before his readers. We're making it up as we go, and it's a kick to share the adventure—Kimball

Counting the Hours

2008-10-08T13:14:00.000+01:00

I can’t sleep, can't.

Haven’t had a proper night's sleep for at least a week.

I get up in the middle of the night and work on my computer, then crawl back into bed. The first leg of the Volvo Ocean Race starts on Saturday. It's 6,500 miles to Cape Town and I'm down to counting days instead of weeks and hours instead of days but as of Thursday I've finally made it to a normal prep mode. Jonathan McKee on Puma is doing the same things I'm doing today. This is good.

On my mind, on my mind. There are the obvious weather forecasting and navigation riddles, but this event is different from any other race I’ve ever done. I know that the reason I'm restless is more complicated than trying to figure out what this low pressure system or that high pressure system is going to do to the Med for the first 48 hours of sailing. This is the Volvo Ocean Race, after all. ‘Life at the Extreme’ is the promise. At times I'm overwhelmed, and it's all about emotion. I’m going to sail around the world.

Delta Lloyd tested after relaunching on Wednesday, Photo by Rick Tomlinson

It’s meaningful that we start from Spain, considering the many explorers that embarked from Spain ‘back in the day.’ This leads directly to another emotion: Fear, utter fear, and I'm not afraid to tell you. As a navigator I know the world is not flat. I know we will not sail off a waterfall at the edge of the world. I know that we will not be attacked by scary green sea monsters rising from the abyss. However, I am scared of the beast, the boat itself. In our training we saw the power and unforgiving nature of the Volvo Open 70. These boats hit speeds of 30 to 40 knots. They break people.

Hopefully, tonight will be the night that I get a full night sleep, although in truth I'm too up to care if I do or don’t. Our Irish skipper, Ger O'Rourke, says, “We’ve got a bit on, but hopefully we can give the crew an early night tonight and a day off on Friday.”

We'll see.

This writing will soon morph into a blog at sailmagazine.com. I invite you to follow Team Delta Lloyd around the world. I'll try to share what life is like onboard, and I'll share the decision-making processes directly from the nav station. Because the Volvo Ocean Race has a system to prevent teams from gaining outside assistance, I can tell you anything without fear that it will be used against us.

Feel free to send blog requests and questions to blog@gregorysports.com. SAIL magazine will sift through for the best questions and forward them to me onboard. This race will be a first. For the first time ever, race fans can interview sailors in near-real time.

Here's the team.

Photo by David Branigan/Oceansport