Russian Igor Zaretsky for quite a long time is a Golden Globe last Race (now the eighth) place. Of his nearest rival, Australian Mark Sinclair (Mark Sinclair) it is separated by almost 900 nautical miles, and the situation fails to improve. All because of a thicket of sea ducks that occupied the bottom of the yacht Esmeralda Zaretsky.
After a long deliberation on 21 November, during the traditional radio session Zaretsky told the race organizers that he was forced to take a difficult decision and sent to the Australian port of Perth, there to lift the boat out of the water, clean it and at the same time to make the necessary repairs. This means a quick transition of the Russians in the class of Chichester.
“I have these bushes never seen. It’s not the grass, not shells. It is a solid mass of worms with a finger thick and a length of ten centimeters, and they on the body as a meadow. The heads are large with sink. Before the boat was 5-6 knots, now in the same condition — 3-4 node. And in light winds — well in General”, — said the sailor.
According to him, due to the living of the carpet on Esmeralda is the hydro, due to the low speed can not handle the autopilot. In addition, the boat is to upgrade the rigging.
“Everything is falling apart with amazing speed. All you need to take in triple size. The stock cables is the same: wear out with time,” explained Zaretsky.
Now to Perth to Russian is to have less than 1000 nautical miles. Zaretsky hopes to reach the port within two weeks. According to the tracker, at the time of writing he was at 2.8 per node. For comparison, the race leader Frenchman Jean-Luc van den Heede (Jean Luc van den Heede) that broke during the storm mount guys and going very cautiously, rate — 5.2 per node. He’s still the fastest in the racing fleet.
According to GGR, this is a big problem with “hares” on the bottom of the Esmeralda has arisen due to the fact that shortly before the start when the boat has arrived in Les Sables d’olonne (France), the team picked it up out of the water and carefully cleaned.
During the cleaning of the housing partially removed good paint, and with it antifouling coating that was applied before the last exit of the boat from Spain to France. The cleaned surface was covered with varnish, forgetting to restore the layer of “neoplastika”.
Van den Heede, which seems to be the only one of the fleet almost did not complain about the uninvited guests, before the start of the case was not only three layers of conventional antifouling, but another one to wash off. Probably to ensure that the coating is not dissolved ahead of time due to strong tidal currents, his boat was even wrapped in blue reinforced film. Here’s “the girl in the beauty salon”. In the end, a small amount of shellfish settled just above the level to which the boat was covered with “pobratimy”.
The Estonian Uku, Randmaa (Uku Randmaa, 3rd place), who was actively involved in cleaning boats from the thickets of seafood last week, to finish prevented the first wave, and then sharks. Faced with predators, Estonian decided that to cope with this task is approximately 80% — it is also a good result, which is enough.
In a position a bit similar to that faced by Zaretsky, was the Finnish party Lehtinen, Tapio (Tapio Lehtinen, 6th place in the race). Although his boat “neoplastic” no one flushed, it just coated composition, which is calculated on the Baltic sea. For the southern ocean it was not poisonous.
But apparently, even such a layer is much better than nothing. Some time ago Finn on their own coped with the invasion stowaways, and biological disaster like the one that happened in Russian, in his case out of the question.
classificationgeneralgoingrussianzaretsky
What do you think?