Riechers: „We lost contact with the leading group, so if you are slightly behind you have to try something. That is what we have done. It was a calculated risk. It seemed like the best option for us.“
Skippers Quotes
Jorg Riechers (GER), Renault Captur:“ We came into the Doldrums yesterday and until today still had some wind, I thought we started to break out of the Doldrums in the night, in the late evening, we had the SE wind kick in and then it died away and it was back to the NE wind and now we can see the trade winds clouds on the horizon to the south of us and so I think probably we will break out of the Doldrums in the next few hours. Hopefully.
Our strategy was based on two things. We saw that the trade winds were really quite far south and so things were really not very normal, as they should be, so we thought there might be a passage a little boit more east which looked good on the weather charts. Normally it is a little bit crazy to try and cross at 24 or 25 west. But it seems in these special circumstance it seems it might be an option, because you get such a good angle when you come out, we would have 200 miles of leverage on the other boats, so we can sail deeper and faster. So the east can be good. And the decision was also based a little by he fact we had the rudder problem just before the Cape Verde islands and we damaged our Code 5 so we had to sail a little bit higher and that defined our approach to the Doldrums as well. So it was 70 per cent tactical thinking and 30 per cent circumstances.
Well, if we were to get out of the Doldrums now then I am confident it would be a big success. Now we have to wait and see until we break out. In any case because of our halyard problem a little after the start, then we lost contact with the leading group, so if you are slightly behind you have to do something. That is what we have done. It was a calculated risk. It seemed like the best option to us. “
