LISBON // When last seen during the Volvo Ocean Race, Team Vestas Wind were stuck on a rock in the Indian Ocean, near Mauritius, their grounded boat slowly being battered to pieces.
Over the weekend, a rebuilt Vestas Wind boat returned to the water for its first sail, ahead of the in-port race near Lisbon on Saturday and the departure for Leg 8 to Lorient on Sunday.
“It’s no longer a boat-building race,” said Chris Nicholson, the Australian skipper of the Danish boat. “We’re back in a boat race.”
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The battle to return Vestas Wind to the Volvo Ocean Race has been an interesting sidelight to the race led by Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing’s Azzam.
After crashing on to a reef on November 29 during Leg 2 and damaging huge sections of the hull, many observers expected the team to give up the race.
But the Denmark-based wind energy company Vestas and their backers were determined to salvage what they could and then set a highly ambitious target of returning to the race for Legs 8 and 9.
That involved two huge hurdles: recovering the boat as intact as possible from the reef and rebuilding the shattered Volvo Ocean 65 in four months, half the time it normally takes to construct the one-design vessel.
Part 1 of “Mission Nearly Impossible” was successfully completed when Vestas Wind made a moonlit arrival, via lorry, in the Portuguese capital midweek.
Part 2 was the boat’s first sail from Lisbon to Cascais and back, on Saturday, when the boat successfully encountered 25 knots of breeze with new navigator Tom Addis, who replaced the Dutchman Wouter Verbraak.
“Getting the boat in the water was a huge thing in the sense that it was a milestone,” Nicholson said. “But I knew that we still hadn’t been sailing – all we had was a boat in the water. Now, we needed to sail it.”
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