Way back in November, in Cape Town, almost five months and 29,000 nautical miles ago, Bouwe Bekking called it.
The Volvo Ocean Race (VOR) fleet was about to embark on the second of nine legs. Sailor talk was already about the closeness of racing; Azzam had edged Dongfeng Race Team by 12 minutes at the end of a 25-day first leg and it seemed a pattern was being set.
Few active participants know the race better than Bekking, skipper of Team Brunel, and in his seventh race. His first was back in 1985/86, before quite a few sailors now taking part were born. The fifth leg, he said, from Auckland to Itajai, could be the make-or-break one.
As Ian Walker and Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing's Azzam sailed into Itajai in first place late Sunday afternoon and opened up a big lead on second-place Dongfeng, Bekking seems to have got it right.
Azzam is seven points ahead, with just four, more straightforward and shorter legs to go. In the terms of football leagues, the title is almost sealed, especially if Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing keep their record of finishing on the podium every leg.
But ocean sailing is emphatically not football, or not as controllable, in any case. As Walker will know only too well, and as Dongfeng’s unfortunate mast-breakage highlighted, calamity can strike at any point.
And Walker is not that kind of competitor. He will remember Telefonica’s fate in the last race, how the Spanish team led until Itajai, only to fall away dramatically thereafter. He is exactly the kind of meticulous, obsessive skipper who will not think of winning the race until he actually wins the race.
Until then, he will make sure everything is just as it should be in every leg to ensure his oft-repeated pre-race aim: a top-three finish in every leg.
This taming of the toughest leg, which makes Azzam the only boat in the race with two leg wins, had a typically Walker-ian stamp. The navigator Simon Fisher, a man firmly in keeping with Walker's philosophy, had made clear before the leg that two primary aims had to be balanced.
Keep the boat in one piece was the first, and given Azzam's troubles and inability to finish this leg last time, it was doubly imperative this time. But, when conditions allow, push the boat hard and fast as possible.
The one-design Volvo Ocean 65 is a more robust vessel than the 2011/12 Volvo Open 70 and Azzam finishing without major damage was a major plus. Once news came through of Dongfeng's mast, the pragmatic Walker knew Azzam had to just finish, rather than finish necessarily first or second, to take advantage.
The decision to drop keel on two occasions when winds reached 50 knots and above, was made with this in mind. “We dropped the keel, we tried to manage it, we lost probably about 10 miles to the fleet doing so, but in hindsight it seems like a pretty shrewd decision,” Walker said in Itajai. It could turn out to be a decisive decision.
But when they had to, they cranked it up with the best of them. They won the IWC 24-hour Speed Record Challenge for this leg, tearing through 551 miles in one day on March 30. No boat has covered more miles in this edition of the race.
For a man who has sailed the VOR previously with boats that were not swift enough, this was an especially pleasing award. “We were so stoked with the record,” he said.
“After about eight hours I said to the guys, ‘Look, I want to get that, even if it means losing distance in the race, I want to go for it.’ That’s what actually got us back in with the leaders.”
Matters now are set up perfectly for Azzam. Emirati sailor Adil Khalid returns to the crew for Leg 6, to Newport, Rhode Island, which begins on April 19. That returns an already strong crew to its strongest formation. Dongfeng, meanwhile, face a race against time to have a new mast refitted in time for the start.
And the racing now, as Khalid pointed out last week, is mostly straight-line, drag-racing. It is the kind of racing Walker thrives on, as had been pointed out plenty before the race began.
The expectation has heaped pressure on him and it has shown in his regular sleepless stints, which are now becoming a staple VOR story. But he prefers it that way. It leaves everything in his hands, and the more-than-capable ones of his crew.
“The great thing about one-design is if you sail well, you do well and if you make mistakes or don’t sail well, you don’t,” he said.
They will not do anything silly right now. Four more not-silly legs and there is a strong chance glory awaits.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
