After a tough 24 hours Team Malizia still leads as top five vie for positioning

Early leaders Team Malizia (GER) have suffered several costly encounters with rogue wind shifts caused by huge rain clouds that forced them to sail further north than they would have preferred. 

Frustratingly for the German-flagged entry, their closest rivals further south – Paul Meilhat’s United by the Ocean (FRA) and Francesca Clapcich’s 11th Hour Racing (USA) – appear to have avoided the flukey breezes entirely and have been making consistently faster progress to the east.

Team Malizia’s Justine Mettraux (SUI) explained the recurring scenario: “We were a bit more north than our opponents and we had some headers (windshifts) that were unexpected, so we couldn't go east as much as we would like,” she said. “That's happening again, at the moment. We are supposed to have the wind around 150–160 direction and at the moment we have the wind much more in front of us. We have north-east, which is really not ideal as the other boats don't have that". 

“So we have lost quite a lot of ground today. But there is not much we can do except try to make the most with what we have and hope it will improve. But it's not been easy since last night.”

Compounding the German team’s problems was the discovery that a hatch cover had blown off the forward ballast tank, spilling sea water into the bow of the boat. Skipper Boris Herrmann fixed the problem by swapping in a hatch cover from the boat’s aft ballast tank, before pumping the bow section dry. 

The crew realised there was a problem when the water level indicator on the forward tank began to steadily fall. 

“The level on the indicator was getting lower and lower, so I went forward to check,” Herrmann explained. “I found that one of the inspection hatches had blown off with the slamming of the boat. It was full of water in the front – about 200 litres in that compartment. So we stole a cover from the back ballast, put it in the front and emptied out the water. Now we can use our ballast again in the front. But I hope we will not forget that in the back we have no hatch cover!”

All the time Team Malizia were haemorrhaging distance in the north, in the south Meilhat and Clapcich were making steady gains to close down Herrmann’s early advantage. 

So much so, in fact, that at around midnight CEST / 2200 UTC Meilhat’s French crew took the race lead and held on to it for a couple of hours. But by this afternoon Team Malizia were back at the top of the rankings based on distance to the finish. At 1400 CEST / 1200 UTC they held an 11-nautical-mile lead over United by the Ocean, with Team Francesca Clapcich powered by 11th Hour Racing sitting in third, a further nine nm back.

Fourth this afternoon – after appearing to put on a surge overnight – is Kojiro Shiraishi’s DMG MORI Sailing Team (JPN), 42 nm off the lead, with Oliver Heer’s Swiss entry Embrace the Challenge in fifth, another five nm behind. 

Conrad Colman’s non-foiling MSIG Europe (NZL) had been doing a good job of hanging on to the faster foiling boats, until what appears to be a headsail furling issue forced the crew to bear away and sail downwind to the north while they fixed it. It was an issue that cost the New Zealand crew around 30 nm of distance to the fleet. By 1400 CEST today they were back on course, albeit now well to the north and 116 nm off the lead.

This afternoon the top five teams were sailing north-east at between 12 and 19 knots in southerly winds ranging from 12 to 18 knots.

As much as these foilers are racing each other, all the crews are also focused on optimising their position in relation to the North Atlantic low pressure system that is forming around them. The ideal position is to try to get ahead of the front and ride its leading edge as it sweeps rapidly eastward. Fall further back and you risk getting caught in boat-breaking conditions in the heart of the storm. 

“We are trying to go as fast as we can but we have a little sea state – swell – coming from the bow,” Meilhat said. “It is not very comfortable, but it is sunny and fast. I think these will be better conditions than what we will find over the following days, so we are trying to enjoy them.” 

Meilhat confirmed his plan was to try to be as far ahead of the depression as possible by the end of the day in order to avoid the worst of the conditions. 

“The more you are back, the more you have strong winds and big waves,” he summarised.

During Friday’s Super Sprint Team Malizia earned a measure of satisfaction after that tough 24 hours, taking their second win of the series over the DMG MORI Global One boat, while Conrad Colman’s MSIG Europe team made a surprising and impressive entry onto the podium taking third place.