Several reports reference sledgehammers, but the most graphic is from Gustav Morin, media crew member on Ericsson 3:

You’re looking straight up in the sky when it hits you, and well over the top it’s free falling. One, two three and bam!

When you land, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s surrealistic. Like sitting in the head of a sledgehammer when the world’s strongest man is smashing it through a block of cement.

These boats are designed to be very fast downwind in heavy weather, but upwind they are far from sea-kindly – witness the fact that two of them (Green Dragon and Telefonica Black) suffered hull damage on this leg.

A far cry from Steve Dashew’s short-handed cruising designs. Steve, having reached the age where he and his wife don’t feel like handling large rigs by themselves, has transferred his sailboat design experience to the world of big powerboats in the Fast Pilot Boat (FPB) project,  which – to my mind, at least – makes today’s typical power superyacht look silly. But then, superyachts aren’t designed for quite the same purpose.

Green Dragon, with spinnaker halyards doing duty for her broken forestay, must have had another problem because as I write this the race viewer shows her reaching off to join the rest of the fleet in the shelter of the island.

Bouwe Bekking in Telefonica Blue headed out of shelter earlier than anyone else, and his gutsy  move is paying off handsomely so far. Telefonica Black tried the same thing a bit later, but is now reaching off – something must have gone wrong.

The two Ericsson boats are still tacking up the shore, playing safe and probably hoping Bekking will break something, but he’s nearly 80 miles ahead and half way to Taiwan now.

Ken Read sounded exhausted as well as disappointed in his latest audio report. They were well placed, pounding steadily through big seas, when the boom broke – not something you’d expect on a beat. They’ve limped into a sheltered cove to assess the damage and see what they can do in the way of a jury rig, but are still racing.

There’s no news about what damage Delta Lloyd has suffered, but she has suspended racing for this leg and is now moored in a sheltered place.

The crews are going to remember this leg for quite a while.

Both Telefonica boats broke a daggerboard. There was no clear sign of impact with anything, and the boards should have been operating at no more than 20% of their designed load at the time.

The Telefonica team had provided themselves with two spare daggerboards – one port, one starboard – to cover their two boats, but both boats broke their port boards. Luckily for them, the firm that built the boards built two more on their own initiative, so they were able to ship a second port board to Cochin.

Hopefully, the spares will clear customs in time. This is the kind of situation in which you need someone with an interest in the race who has influence in the right places – it’s pretty obvious that an Ocean 70 daggerboard has no market value once the fleet has departed, but jobsworths are everywhere

The thoroughness with which the Ericsson team have prepared their boats, and the skill with which their skippers have sailed them, is hammered home once again by the fact that their shore team has no other work than the expected maintenance and minor repair tasks. Well done.

Even the real boat navigators changed their minds, but I actually set out with the eastbound course in mind – then changed before it was too late. Let me explain.

The first few times I animated a five-day forecast, what I saw was a straightforward beat against the trade winds, until I reached an area of variable winds closer to the Cape. It would be slow, but predictable, and it wouldn’t need constant attention until the last few days. Going south from Fernando de Noranha, I saw a fast reach for the first half, but a rapid descent into the swirling vortices and dead spots of the south Atlantic depressions, all hurtling round the globe. Even allowing for the fact that the east-west distance down there was less than it appeared to be on the chart, it looked a long way to sail. The good winds were strong, but they occupied a smaller area than the bad or feeble winds. I would have to work and plan hard if I wanted to make good use of this route, and initially I was prepared to bet that enough people would fail for me to do reasonably well by following the eastern route.

It took a day and a half (during which I climbed steadily up the leaderboard as I tacked on windshifts every six hours or so) for me to decide that this was a boring route to guaranteed mediocrity. I had also been reading informed comment in the reports on the real race, and began to believe I understood how to approach navigating the southerly course. As I saw it, the technique was:

“Head south as fast as you can, keeping an eye on the depressions as they race past in the lower latitudes. Try to anticipate well enough to catch a ride on one. When you fall off the back of it, go as fast as you can in the direction of the next one. And so forth, until you end up with everyone else in a huge flat patch outside Capetown.”

As the days go by, I’ll tell you where this strategy takes me. Whatever the end result, I’ll get some practice at open sea navigation and matching my pace to that of passing weather patterns. And it won’t be boring.

I spent yesterday convinced that I needed to head for the coast for as long as I dared in order to pick up a stronger wind, and sacrificed over 100 places in order to do so. I was not alone in making this choice.

The wind did arrive, but it was too little, too late. Instead of retrieving over 100 places while I was asleep, I retrieved about 40, leaving me still in the bunch but over 50 nautical miles behind the leaders.

Today’s serious chat subjects included a short lecture about polar diagrams (charts of boat speed against wind direction for a series of wind strengths) and how to use them, given by a competitor whose real-life occupation is extracting information from weather forecasts and using it to help sailors.

I didn’t learn anything new, but it jolted me into making a more technical effort to judge my best course each time I set it, instead of doing it ‘by the seat of my pants’. I spent hours thinking, scribbling and experimenting, and finally came up with a simple technique which is not as accurate as using chart tools on real paper, but did eventually improve my performance once I got the drill right. I can now class myself as an Entry-Level Sail On Line Navigation Nerd, and it was fun making my brain work a bit. Having started the day around 240th position and 54 miles behind the leaders, I am now 182nd and exactly 50 nautical miles behind the leaders. What’s more, I have a plan which I am (once again) convinced will gain me more places during the night.

Let’s see what the cold, hard light (or foggy murk again) of day brings – a knowing smile, or a ‘back to the drawing board’ sigh.