Photos: L © movistar R © movistar

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Thu, 25 May 2006 14:50:00 UTC

Hope is fading fast within the movistar team, who have been out combing the Atlantic for their abandoned yacht, after yesterday’s aerial search failed to locate the Volvo Open 70.

The team, which left the severely damaged yacht on Sunday night, searched 900 square miles of ocean where they believe the yacht could be, but with extensive cloud cover and a mix-up over flight arrangements hindering efforts, time is now running out for a positive outcome.

Any future attempts to locate the yacht, which the team accepts may have already sunk, now relies on the insurance companies, working with the underwriters and surveyors, deciding that the operation justifies the costs involved.

Campbell Field, movistar’s shore manager and head of the retrieval effort, said, “Obviously as time goes by the probability of getting the boat back is diminishing.

“We are not searching as such right now, just planning the next course of action. Now, from here on in, we are purely waiting for the underwriters and representative surveyors to see if they want to action another search because these things aren’t cheap. How much do they want to spend to get it back? That’s the issue.”

Field also revealed the boat on standby to retrieve the boat pending a sighting has been stood down for the time-being. The condition of the boat out in the Atlantic, he admitted, is unknown since the telemetry failed on Monday night.

“There are two or three different things that might have happened,” Field said. “If the keel has gone for good then it will still be afloat but upside down. It could be afloat, but up to its gunnels. Or, it could have sank. Pure speculation.”

He refuted, however, that if the boat has sunk to the bottom of the ocean it has taken with it the mysteries of its failing keel.

He said, “We have a lot of good images that were taken onboard. We have spent hours poring over photographs and drawings of what has happened. We have gone right back through the history of everything that has happened to that area of the boat. We have the facts of what happened, we can go the road to a certain extent about deducing why it happened. But being able to inspect the boat would increase our confidence in the understanding.”

Field is holding out hope of another sortie over the area, but after the fiasco of chartering a plane this time round – the pilots turned up without a briefing on their mission, and then lost a day seeking clearance from HQ in Brussels - it is likely they would use a jet.

He continued, “We ordered a plane that we believed would enable us to get to the site and have a good search for a couple of hours and get back. When it turned up it wasn’t necessarily feasible and the pilots weren’t briefed on what we wanted to achieve.

“We flew from Bournemouth to Cork, Ireland, where we were due to start the search from, but they needed clearance and that meant we had to wait overnight. Well, there was a Munster rugby game, the city was mobbed and getting accommodation was a nightmare.

“Finally we got out there, cruising at 500 feet for about an hour, searched an area of about 90 square miles, where we calculated the boat would be due to drift and everything.

“We had a high degree of confidence where the boat would be, but we could only see water about 30 percent of the time.

“This point in time we haven’t located the boat, but I’m still looking at the weather every 12 hours to plan the drift. We will go out again if it’s ruled viable.

“I think we’ll have to charter a jet rather than a prop jet to give us more time over the area. To be honest, our chances of getting the boat are decreasing, but we haven’t totally given up.”

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