Azzam’s turnaround from last Volvo Ocean Race is all credit to the crew

Crew members celebrate with their families on arrival in Cape Town. Ian Roman / VOR

It was on November 5, 2011, that Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing’s voyage to Cape Town, as well as their Volvo Ocean Racing victory hopes, effectively ended.

Their boat, Azzam, splashed down from a wave, and as skipper Ian Walker later recalled, the mast “kept on going”.

The power conduit of their sailing machine broke into three pieces only six hours into what should have been a journey of nearly 6,500 nautical miles.

The shocked crew cut the mainsail free from what was left of the mast, a dangerous mass of wreckage over the side, motored back to Alicante and bravely spoke of re-entering the race, of chasing the fleet south through the Atlantic Ocean. But five days later, Azzam pulled out of Leg 1, after Walker made what he called “one of the hardest decisions of my life”.

How sweet, then, it must have been for Walker and Simon Fisher and Adil Khalid and the rest of the Azzam veterans to arrive in Cape Town yesterday – exactly three years after their abortive 2012 effort – at the head of the fleet.

The crew had gotten there first, and not via jet plane, as in 2011. Azzam crossed the line with wind in her sails, and not tucked in the belly of a container ship.

Abu Dhabi had won a leg before this one. That came in the spring of 2013, when a navigational hunch by Fisher found a powerful breeze that allowed one of the slowest boats in the fleet to win Leg 7, from Miami to Lisbon.

This victory is far more significant. In a fleet of seven identically prepared Volvo 65 boats, the Abu Dhabi crew showed it was best. If this is a race that will be decided by sailors, rather than builders, Walker’s crew just struck the first blow.

Not all of it was plain sailing. Azzam moved ahead by taking the traditional route north of Cape Verde’s islands while others made a mid-channel gamble that failed. Then, hoping to extend the lead, Azzam sailed south-west down the coast of Brazil while others remained further offshore. This move was not a success; it cost Azzam about 60 miles that took days to make good.

When they finally turned east and a bit north, while in the Roaring 40s, south of Cape Town, they resumed a pattern that had begun north of the equator.

Opponents would come close, chopping their lead to a mile or two, but Azzam nearly always responded by stretching the lead anew. Only three times over the final 12 days were they headed, mostly briefly, and generally by a boat on a different path.

Azzam and the Chinese boat, Dongfeng, went nose-to-tail for nearly 1,000 fast and wet miles, ahead of Cape Town, and Walker’s men led for all of it.

The race, of course, has just begun. Eight more legs and some 30,000 nautical miles remain to be traversed.

Leg 2 will take the fleet up the coast of Africa, perhaps veering toward the Maldives, before racing into the Gulf in mid-December and finishing in Abu Dhabi, where the fleet will celebrate the new year.

We are yet to see what sort of toll this new sort of Volvo race will take on crews. One reporter called it “inshore racing without the shore”, a race that had the enormous distances of offshore racing but the minute-to-minute calculations and physically demanding tacking moves of a two-hour race in a harbour.

Historically, over the course of 6,000 miles, fleets scatter. One boat might be stronger on that point of sailing, this one on another.

In Leg 1, the leaders remained bunched, in their cookie-cutter boats, and the crews could see their nearest competitors.

The primitive impulse of every skipper to be out front led to day after day of ragged and insufficient sleep while matching wits with the boat five miles aft.

The videos from the past 10 days seemed to show grim, exhausted crews, barely holding together body and soul.

Let the healing begin.

Another reward for being first into Cape Town is the longest recovery period. Azzam will not set sail until November 19.

Lots of bunk time, leisurely meals and the warm glow of early success should make for a very pleasant stay in South Africa.

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