Volvo Ocean Race - boat breaking time
One indication of how rough it was out there is the fact that the only video clip that contains actual video rather than voice plus a few stills is the one Rick Deppe made when Puma’s boom broke.
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.
