The Ocean Race fleet continues to suffer a surprising number of equipment failures.
Earlier Team Malizia suffered a failure of Code zero lock for its headsail which resulted in the sail going overboard.
They quickly recovered the wrecked headsail but when the sail fell the halyard ripped a 26cm long hole in the face at the top of the carbon fibre mast .
The team discovered the damage to the spar on Wednesday afternoon and worked with their technical team on a plan to effect a repair at sea.
They have now to carry out a repair before they are able to sail at a competitive pace again.
The team will be fully briefed by the tech team but the strength and endurance to do the repair in these conditions should not be underestimated.
The repair involves preparing the area at the top of the 28 meter mast and will involve sanding the area, preparing the lamination and then laminating large patches to the top of the mast to cover the ripped area.
The repair will take hours and throughout the mast will be swaying at huge degrees in the large Southern Ocean swell.
The repair should give the mast the same strength as before and allow the team to continue sailing with full use of all sails. If the crew are not fully satisfied with the repair then they could still continue but with reduced sails.
As the team needs many hours to do this they have waited until first light Thursday to start and continue under reduced sail until then.
The Team Malizia crew has had a grueling Thursday, have been taking turns up the mast with reinforcing sheets of carbon fibre that need to be glued and cured to make the repair.
As of 15:00 UTC, the team was still putting the work in up the rig, but skipper Boris Herrmann says the plan is to push forward as soon as possible.
They hope to resume full-on sailing on Friday.
Meanwhile at 15:00 hrs Thursday, Team Holcim-PRB has a 300+ nautical mile lead.
Second are 11th Hour Racing Team, but the gap is growing hour by hour with Escoffier and his crew sailing up to 10 knots more quickly than the pursuing boats.
It’s a similar story for Biotherm, nearly 200 miles further back, but also experiencing unusually light conditions for a boat that has dipped its bow into the ‘Roaring 40s’.
For these teams, the roar of the south is yet to come. “Unusual,” was the way Sam Davies described it.
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