Skippers comment after first day of Barcelona World Race

[Source: Barcelona World Race]

Jean-Pierre Dick on Paprec-Virbac 2 speaks of yesterday’s departure:

“I have some beautiful memories of the start. It was really fantastic, really moving to see so many people on the dockside, like the feeling you get from a Vendée! The winds picked up and it was great.

It is a little hard physically because there are a lot of manoeuvres to do and it is hard to make the right tactical choices, and that can be so decisive.

The wind is quite strange at the moment and it isn’t easy to make sense of the weather information coming in and choose a correct strategy in such light Mediterranean breeze – it’s the hardest part of the game!

Tonight we rested a little but we had to move the boat a lot, so between thinking strategy and manoeuvring the boat we were quite active! Today without much wind it’s all going to be a bit flat, and our game will have to be slick. We have to try and keep our chin up, not lose our cool.”

Dominique Wavre on TEMENOS II, after a restful night:

“Right now it’s all quite calm. The start was pretty lively as a way to set off! We had a few worrying moments filling the ballast, but once we solved that we got back into the rhythm of things again and are impatiently awaiting position updates.
The departure of Temenos II was magnificent, we really enjoyed it, even with a couple of little collision frights, we got straight into the race. We are now dealing with the extremely light Mediterranean air and awaiting the position reports. It looks like its going to stay quite calm, but we are seeing a bit of everything with the wind direction. Last night we both managed to rest a little; on a rota system we each had some recovery time.”

Jérémie Beyou on Delta Dore, after his first night on board Delta Dore:

“We would rather have this kind of start! It is always great to get back on the water. It was a little bit of a muddle at the beginning with so many spectator boats around the course so we tried to stay safe by keeping away at the start and on the first leg downwind but tried to keep ourselves in the loop, and to come out of it in second place was quite nice as well!

We saw that some of the other boats had gone into the spectator fleet but we preferred to keep closer to the coast, be careful avoiding the mark with the wind, and make sure we kept the boat in one piece.

Mediterranean conditions are prevailing right now, and we were all quite grouped together during the night. After a while it died out completely and a number of boats came to a standstill, whilst others have broken free. At night you don’t see the surface of the water so well, and it is all a bit of a lottery, later on we’ll see where everyone else is.

We haven’t worked out an exact system but we are both trying to get as much rest as possible on our shift which last night was early on when the boat was going quite well with just one of us on deck. It is quite nice to be sailing again after such an intensive week, and after a good sleep we have got rid of some of the pressure.

All we need to do now is find the right way through - if the wind would just start blowing a little! I’m working on short term predictions, and we have some different ideas in mind that we have to check out, but it’s not looking promising, and it looks like its going to be a long haul; we are already behind to where we thought we would be. We just want to get past Gibraltar, because this little tour around the Mediterranean looks like taking a while. We might not get there until at least Wednesday…”