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21 February 2003Jules Verne Challenge Update: Day 22Click here for previous update
Ellen and Crew in Kingfisher 2www.ellenmacarthur.com
Day 22 from start
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Position:
Day 22, 1352GMT
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IN BRIEF:
A SLOW 24 HOURS, ONLY 300 MILES IN LAST 24HRS, BUT CREW SLOW BOAT TO WORK ON REPAIRING STARBOARD DAGGERBOARD through the night. It was discovered late yesterday that the daggerboard had been damaged in the collision - it probably saved the rudder in fact, as the broken piece of daggerboard deflected off the rudder and not the submerged object that KINGFISHER2 collided with on the previous night. "It became clear we had lost half the daggerboard and we were all pretty surprised to think we had not realised that it had gone..." said MacArthur.
DAGGERBOARDS OPTIMISE UPWIND PERFORMANCE - NOT A BIG PROBLEM FOR NOW in the Southern Ocean but will make the upwind part of the course back up the Atlantic after rounding Cape Horn more difficult... "We have about 1 metre of repaired daggerboard underneath - it won't effect our downwind performance at all but not perfect for sailing upwind," said Ellen. It is possible to change the daggerboards over putting the full-length, undamaged daggerboard in the relevant hull depending on whether they are on port or starboard tack. It is not like racing round the bouys, tacking to make a mark - KINGFISHER2 will stay on one tack for long periods of time... Transferring daggerboards although hard is not impossible especially with 14 crew on board... ELLEN did this on her own in the Vendée Globe when she damaged her port daggerboard mid-Atlantic on the way back to the finish - then she had to remove a board that was 1.5 times her height and over 3 times her weight...
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Rigging
up halyard to remove damaged dagger board, working at night.
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ELLEN AND CREW SLOWED BOAT FOR 6 HOURS TO MAKE REPAIR to the 4-metre high daggerboard weighing 200 kilos, solving the problem there and then rather than risk the board getting jammed in the casing. The lighter winds actually helped the crew - trying to make these kind of repairs in 50 knots would have been a different story. It took 8 of the crew to lift the board out and cut away the damaged shards of carbon, filling holes and adding a pad eye to the damaged end before returning the board upside down to its casing. There was no other damage to the daggerboard casing or any other part of the boat. The repairs to the rudder fixings damaged yesterday have also been made. KINGFISHER2 is now back sailing at 100 per cent.
SLOWER PACE HAS MEANT KINGFISHER2 HAVE NOT HOOKED into the north-westerlies forecast but instead are going to be effected by the next low pressure system. A stressful day yesterday between daggerboard problem and difficult weather decisions for Ellen...
JARGON BUSTER:
DAGGERBOARD
Daggerboards are used to improve upwind performance - like a centreboard
on a dinghy, they help prevent the boat from being pushed sideways
off their proposed course. When the boat is sailing upwind the daggerboard
is lowered under the boat . There is a port and starboard daggerboard
positioned approximately one-third back from the bow, and depending
on which tack the boat is on ie port or starboard, the appropriate
board is lowered into the water
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Board goes back in, working at night.
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LATEST CREW NEWS - ANDREW PREECE
This afternoon the call came on deck via the intercom from the nav station: Ellen's voice saying "Let's do it. Let's gybe".
"Beautiful," says Neal. "Beautiful" being Neal's stock response to anything that involves heading south, heading towards more wind or involving more sail. "I can't stand it here, I've got sunburn." So up come the standby watch and little over 20 minutes later we are on a true heading of 145; even a simple gybe in under 20 knots of wind is a complicated, labour-intensive and lengthy process that involves dropping from full main to two reefs to prevent batten breakage in the seaway during the gybe, sometimes (though not on this occasion) hoisting the jib to keep the pace on during the gybe, furling the gennaker, gybing, unfurling the gennaker, winding out the two reefs which takes in itself five grinders giving some for more than five minutes. And then we had to set the staysail and move the Solent and storm jibs back to the aft end of the Best Western in readiness for some more breeze and some white knuckle riding. In all it took ten of us nearly an hour of wrestling and, unlike world wrestling, every second of it was for real!