It has been a turbulent week for CAMPER, one that started promisingly but ended with a cruel twist of fate. Turn the clock back a few days and the sun was shining brightly, while the crew was awestruck at the sight of Kita-io Shima, a volcanic Japanese island a mile wide and 800 metres high. Soon the boat was nibbling chunks out of Groupama’s lead as it raced towards the equator in benign northeast trade winds. Life couldn’t be sweeter.
“The sun’s out, we’ve got 13 knots on the beam… It doesn’t get much better,” said bowman Daryl Wislang, while navigator Will Oxley shook his head at the absurdity of the crew finding themselves back on Sanya’s latitude, nine days after leaving the Chinese city behind.
However, fortunes changed dramatically on February 29 – the extra day in this leap year. As the boat steamed south in treacherous conditions towards New Zealand, at speeds of more than 20 knots, one of the team’s most important sails suddenly ripped in two.
Sleep-deprived, wet and hungry, the CAMPER crew was forced to replace the J2 foresail with a smaller sail, a move that cost them valuable miles and saw them slip back to fourth place, 100 nautical miles adrift of Groupama.
The latest setback almost certainly means CAMPER will not claim first place in their ‘homecoming’ leg. But there were no angry words or tantrums – just a steely determination among the crew to put things right.
Hamish Hooper, CAMPER’s media crew member, paid tribute to a team galvanized by adversity. “All of the guys on board are pretty amazing,” he said. “Where most people would curse, ask why and descend into short-term depressive anger, they just seem to take the knock on the chin, accept it and move on as best as they possibly can with what they have to work with.”
After dragging the J2 down below, Wislang and helmsman Rob Salthouse set about the daunting task of stitching the two pieces of broken sail back together, an endeavor which took them almost a full day. The 160 sqm sail completely filled the restricted space below deck, forcing the pair to carry out the emergency repair in a space the size of a small family saloon while being thrown around an off road track at breakneck speeds.
Navigator Wll Oxley expressed his admiration for the pair’s Herculean efforts.
“It took about 20 hours to get the sail back up. It was a massive task,” Oxley said. “They had to get it below, dry it, find where the rip was and come up with a plan for the repair.
Then they had to join the two pieces together and lay cloth over the top of that, glue it and then stitch it. It was a very long procedure. Sometimes I’m not sure how they do it. The sail is so big and the boat is so small that putting it back together is very impressive.”
CAMPER is now back up to speed blasting along at over 20 knots. Speaking onboard this morning, Wislang described the extent of the sail damage and expressed his satisfaction at seeing the boat back on track. He said: « It started about 8.5 metrres back from the tack so quite a sizeable tear, we pieced it back together like a jigsaw puzzle and it took about 13 hours, but the best thing it has been up for over 18 hours now which makes all the effort worth it. It is no secret we’re not quite as fast as the other on the reaching condiitons so we’re looking to getting back into a bit of a tactical battle up ahead. »
The CAMPER crew and all their followers will be hoping that this show of grit will be rewarded by another change of fortunes – this time one for the better – as they draw closer to New Zealand.