Three Burning Questions After Leg 3

© Hamish Hooper/CAMPER ETNZ/Volvo Ocean Race

Rob Salthouse and Chris Nicholson grind hard putting a reef in the mainsail as Stu Bannatyne drives onboard CAMPER with Emirates Team New Zealand during Leg 3 of the Volvo Ocean Race.

It took the team the better part of an hour to free themselves of the net, but as Ross explains, that wasn’t the worst of it: “Far worse, while untangling, we sat idle as the dwindling night winds vanished, and we now find ourselves struggling in a windless transition zone while the leaders sail away in the old breeze, and the trailers catch up in the new. It is upsetting.”

Down, but not yet out, Ken Read and navigator Tom Addis faced a crucial decision—stay with the pack and salvage a third, or split and take a shot at the win. “Between Tom and myself, there have always been two ways of approaching this section of the race," says Read. "Straight ahead and beating up the Vietnam coast to get out of the north to south flowing current, or approaching from the east and spending your "easting" early and getting around the good side of two large tidal eddies that are prominent in the South China Sea. Avoiding the current that runs down the Vietnam coast was the key. We clearly liked the east option.

“What is strange about this sport sometimes is that your fate is given to you, like it or not," he continues. "Once we tacked to port, we had a fantastic shift, and when we looked at the scheds for the next 15 hours, we kept the left shift that nobody else ever really appeared to get. We had breeze in the 30s, and everyone else was in the high 40s and 50s. In essence, we went where the wind gods took us, and the others did the same thing. And, like Frank Cammas said in Leg 1 when they split from the fleet down the African coast, I was really surprised nobody else came the way we did. Clearly they saw something we didn't. It didn't work for us.”

Puma’s bold split ended up costing them the third spot on the podium, but their actions show this is a team that doesn’t yet believe that they're out of the race. The numbers, however, aren’t as rosy as Read’s resolve. Puma is now 23 points behind third-place Groupama in the standings. The cloud of bad luck needs to change, but the hard part for Puma is going to be finding boats to put between themselves and Groupama. The French have clearly climbed the steep part of the Volvo 70 learning curve and can’t be counted on to make many mistakes. Without any bad luck, the three Juan K boats would've occupied the top three spots each leg, so it’s safe to assume that CAMPER and Abu Dhabi won’t be sneaking in between the Juan K boats. Puma will need to beat Groupama boat for boat in five of the remaining six legs. This is certainly possible, but Puma needs luck, and some refinement, to make it happen. As an example, in the last update, we featured a video showing how Telefonica has designed a system to make tacking easier.Here is Puma tacking during Leg 3. More efficient tacking by Telefonica allows them to tack on smaller shifts, and slowly separate. In a close race, details like this are the difference between first and fourth.