5 January 2006 - At 12 o'clock GMT Thursday morning,
the Ericsson Racing Team arrived safely into Mossel Bay, South Africa, just
3 days into leg two of the Volvo Ocean Race. Ericsson experienced a failure
to her hydraulic keel movement system, and was forced to head into port to
repair the damage. A short term replacement has been installed, but the
team is currently looking at the option of shipping the boat to Melbourne
to be ready for the inshore race and the start of leg three.
After twelve hours of hard but efficient team work, Ericsson is now back
at sea. The boat left Mossel Bay at 3:00 pm GMT (Thursday), and is now
sailing towards Port Elizabeth in heavy winds. The plan is to ship the
boat to Melbourne, and the shore crew is working hard at securing the
shipment.
The last twelve hours have been hectic for the shore crew to say the
least. Jason Carrington, construction manager and crew member on board
Ericsson, comments on the recent events: "Three days into the leg, as we
were beating into 25 knots of wind, one of the piston rods which cants
the keel sheared off. So from this moment, we were relying on just one
cylinder and loosing pressure. Clearly our only option was to head back
to port."
"The shore team arrived quickly, and we all immediately started working
hard, hoping to carry on sailing into leg 2. We removed the broken
titanium ram, and swapped it for a spare stainless steel ram. But we soon
realized that this would only be a short term solution, as the spare ram
has a different set up to that which we had in place."
Ericsson skipper Neal McDonald commented: "It is clearly disappointing.
We experienced a failure to our keel movement system during the first
leg. We dealt with the problem as well as we could, and worked on it
during the whole stopover in Cape Town. We really thought that this
problem was over, and that we could now sail confidently towards
Melbourne. So of course, everyone is disappointed."
"We will now clearly have to think of this race as a whole, and focus on
the long term objective. This is why we have decided to ship Ericsson to
Melbourne, where we can try to work out a solution that we are all
confident with."
A lot of research is currently being done in order to further develop and
strengthen the hydraulic keel movement system. The team is in close
discussion with his designers at Farr Yacht Design, together with
engineering consultants Semcon. Greg Waters, a hydraulic expert based in
Australia, has also been consulted and has brought valuable help to the
team.
Quotes:
Neal McDonald: "The system does work with one ram,
but you have to ask yourself: if one ram broke, then why shouldn't the
other one break when you are putting twice as much load on it. It is
unbelievable when you think that this part was designed to support
efforts in excess of 100 tons. The only right decision was to get back to
shore."
Tom Braidwood: "The boys put a reef in and then we
heard a decent "bang". We all thought it was a winch or something. But
then Neal came out through the hatch and said: "Put the sails down boys,
we are going home".
We had a win in the first inshore race, and even though we didn't have
such a good race in the second one, we are certainly not out of the race.
We have to get to Melbourne and start all over again. That's all you can
do: get over the disillusion and look for the positive. Everyone has got
total confidence in Neal and we all respect his decision.
Jason Carrington: "We are pretty down. We had a
different problem in the last leg, but in the same area of the keel
movement system. The boat is perfect; she was going fast and I am very
disappointed with these ram problems. It is hard for everyone but you
have to soldier on.