Asked to assess the prospects for an untraversed second leg just before the start in Cape Town, Bouwe Bekking ran down the list of potential finishing positions.
He began with last place. “Bad luck.” He ended with first. “First place is lucky.”
The natural question to ask, as he skippered Team Brunel to a Leg 2 win in the Volvo Ocean Race (VOR) in Abu Dhabi yesterday, was about how lucky his team had been.
“We’re very lucky we won,” he laughed back, without so much as a blink of the eye.
It cannot be down simply to luck, of course. Not when you win a 6,125-nautical-mile leg, not over 23 days of unpredictable sailing weather and not against six other supremely skilled crews in identical boats.
But Bekking and his crew did, perhaps, benefit from a sudden, unexpected tilt of fortune at the very death. Having traded leads repeatedly with Dongfeng Racing over the last week, and having fallen behind on Friday night, they benefited from a sudden gust of wind 90 minutes from the finish line.
It took them, in Bekking’s words, “smoking past Dongfeng” and ultimately to a thrilling win. They clocked in at 23 days, 16 hours and 25 minutes. The pair had sailed side by side for much of the leg, close enough to wave greetings to each other as they changed positions. In the end, only 16 minutes separated them.
It was a second successive close finish, after Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing’s Azzam won last month’s first leg by just 12 minutes. On that occasion too, Dongfeng were the ones to finish second.
“It could’ve been easy all the way or the other way round,” Bekking said. “It has been a very tricky leg, especially the last part, and lots of areas with very low winds. Sometimes, its amazing to see a boat that was basically only a couple of 100 metres away and an hour or two later has gone down past the horizon.”
Azzam will concur. They finished the leg in third, over two hours behind, but registered a podium finish in their homeward leg. But after leading for so much of the leg, skipper Ian Walker could not help but be disappointed.
They had pulled close on Friday night, to within smelling distance of the lead, but lost out as the day dawned and winds became unpredictable. Ultimately, it was, Walker said, a spell in the northern doldrums, an area of generally low winds, that put paid to their chances.
“We went into the northern doldrums slightly west [to the rest of the fleet] and got becalmed for about three hours and that was the difference,” Walker said. “We lost about 25 miles in those three hours and were just playing catch up from there.”
But given Azzam’s poor first week, which included a ripped sail, and the fate of the grounded Team Vestas Wind, Walker was relieved to have finished at all, let alone on the podium. It leaves the Abu Dhabi team tied for first place in the overall race standings on four points, along with Brunel and Dongfeng.
Those emotions were shared by Adil Khaled, who steered Azzam into Abu Dhabi and had been a crucial influence in the home stretch. It was his knowledge and intuition of local conditions that allowed the boat to get so close on Friday night.
“I was dreaming about winning the race and a top-three finish is a great thing for us,” Khaled said. “It was a difficult leg with the wind up and down, especially through the doldrums. But it is a very proud moment for us, a very proud moment for Abu Dhabi.”
osamiuddin@thenational.ae