Little did I know how many people would be fooled... :)

Date: 1st April 2005 09:21
Position: Heading for Cape Town

What luck! :)

Should you be following our progress you will have noticed we've just had a stroke of good luck to follow the bad we've been experiencing recently and thus morale has risen rather a lot.

The past day we've been slow, I mean seriously slow. We've been trimming and trimming and trimming desperately trying to gain more boat speed. The navigator has been meticulously studying to see if some strange current has us in it's cruel grasp and the Skipper has exhausted his extensive experience yet still, we've been dog slow.

This afternoon a friendly voice came on the VHF and to our biggest surprise it wasn't one of the Challenge fleet (well, there is no-one else out here!!). Turns out it's an Australian submarine commander who says that they've been following the race's progress with interest over the past month as they are scheduled to be in these waters for this time. Apparently they've even been watching the boats! They noticed we've been dropping back and so came over to look. They reported that we had hooked a fishing net (this is interesting as there was a big discussion a few days ago that we were too near a fishing buoy!) and were hauling a few hundred-weight of hoki! He said he thought we probably didn't want it so cut it off and we should find things are a bit more back to normal.

We were a bit worried at this point as we thought it might constitute 'outside assistance' and we'd have to report ourselves to the race committee, but upon checking the rules there is no mention of submarines freeing fishing nets being assistance.

The commander wished us well and said they had a sweep stake running and his money was on Team Stelmar. Nice chap! Anyway, onward we go and you'll now see we've trucking along, kite up at about 12 knots WCV. Wonderful!

 

A few excerpts from the letters page:


They mention that they think it is fine to get notice from a submarine saying that they fouled a fishing net. I thought the RRS said that any outside assistance had to be available to all competitors? Using a submarine who happens to be a supporter is not exactly available to all is it? After all if Pindar had such assistance a few days ago then they may not have needed their engine.

In the interests of fairness......

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...and then...

John Ireland has made a good point. Communication from the submarine could be deemed as outside assistance, as it informed the crew that they had caught a net (must be the same nets as PINDAR!), something they hadn't quite fully considered when assessing why their boat speed was under par. Whilst it's a nice friendly gesture by the submarine, other yachts (especially Pindar) could deem that Stelmar gained an unfair advantage from diagnosing the problem earlier than they would have. Submarines aren't mentioned in the RRS, but it doesn't have to be. Even a harmless mobile phone call (when in signal range) asking someone ashore, what the weather is like would be deemed as outside assistance, and must be declared, as it is not public information available to all yachts. It is up to an International Race Jury to judge whether this affected their race result. It will be interesting to see if the Race Officer protests Stelmar, and, breaking the rule of not informing the Race Office at the time of the incident.
It might have been worth Stelmar calling the Race Office to mention the situation.

Maybe the submarine captain's bet will be declared null and void as he's interfered with the race result!!
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Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Just looked at the date.

I really walked into that rubbish about the submarine.

O.k. So I feel stupid. April Bl&&*dy Fools.

Good and proper. Cheers Stelmar
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Cheers John  :)