GREEN DRAGON EMAIL: 'The last 24 hours have been so incident-packed'

Thursday 30th October 2008 08:39

Green Dragon, Ian Walker (Skipper)

I don't really know where to start as the last 24 hours has been so incident packed. I guess I'll start at the beginning which was a tale of various nosedives in increasingly disturbed seas yesterday.

This has led to various bodily injuries all of which are manageable. The luckiest man on the boat is Guo Chuan our Chinese crew member. In one nosedive he managed to fly from the companionway head over heels once or twice and end up head first upside down in the rubbish bag in the galley - a distance of approximately 5 metres forward and 2 down.

Andrew (Mclean) pulled him out by the legs, he was unscathed apart from a new nickname - the 'cannonball'. Not content with this he was on deck for the next one and face planted into a winch - his nose has seen better days but he is still fine he insists.

Back on the track, the front outruns us and we had a 60 degree shift which meant we had to gybe south. We were settling into this course when at 0130 we hit something in the water.

There was a deafening crunch and the boat went from 25 knots to a virtual standstill, Neal (McDonald) who was helming smashed the wheel and everyone else fell over. We inspected the hull, foils and keel for damage as best we could and all seemed fine apart from a huge vibration - presumably caused by whatever was now on the keel.

We decided to live with this until daylight but a few hours later it seemed to have cleared itself. Today we can see clearly on the keel that we hit something hard - thank goodness it wasn't the rudders or they would have broken.

By now people were getting tired after 2 gybes and all this excitement. To make matters worse at first light today we buried the bow so hard the A6 spinnaker came back and stoved in the pulpit and forward stanchions before ripping to pieces.

Our resident sail maker Phil Harmer thinks he can fix it in a day which is good as we need it ASAP. The metalwork can wait until Cape Town.

Somehow Ericsson 3 seems to have carried on in the north wind which confounds the fact that they were west of us as the front passed over. This and all our escapades mean we have lost 3rd place for now. The Green Dragon is wounded but far from slain - we will continue to push as hard as we sensibly can. Right now it is over 30 knots again and it will be for the next 24 hours at least.

Received 08:39 GMT