1 SAIC LA JOLLA STORY from Interpersona ... - Interpersona Oy

Eero Lehtinen’s report from SAIC La Jolla’s last two legs in the Global Challenge:
In the middle of July the Global Challenge
2004-05 yacht race around the world finished
at the final harbor in Portsmouth in England.
In the hard struggle between twelve identical
yachts SAIC La Jolla with skipper Eero Lehtinen
took the fifth placing in the whole race. As such
the placing was a small disappointment for the
crew but in all the spirit was high, though: during
the race of nearly ten months the crew had
no drop outs due to internal problems or injuries.
During the entire race Interpersona has
operated as adviser to SAIC La Jolla and Eero
Lehtinen in challenges with coaching, leadership
and strengthening of team spirit.
Leg 6: Boston - La Rochelle, 3000 sea miles
We started from Boston right beneath the windows of
Boston Harbour Hotel, the traffic in the narrow dock
was busy as usual on Sundays and the wind was of
course weak and blew in various directions. The start
line was so aslant from the wind that it wasn’t possible
to cross the line with the starboard tack. Therefore all
the yachts hankered after the ”starting square” from
the left and windy side. Just a couple of minutes before
sailing we tacked really close to the line at the side of
the judge boats and headed towards the buoy side with
starboard. Thus a couple of yachts had to give way and
we managed to reach the place we aimed for. Finally,
after the last tack, our acceleration towards the line
came too late and we didn’t reach the free wind but
remained in the backwind of BP Explorer and Samsung.
Before them there was Stelmar too, which had made a
false start. We were fourth to cross the line, but weren’t
able to speed up properly in the disturbed winds. When
we also had to tack several times as the wind switched
direction completely we lost even more due to the bigger
foresail. We had as only yacht started with genoa,
which in fact was the right sail for the strong wind, but
slow and clumsy in the numerous turns in the narrow
canals. Not until we arrived outer on the sea the genoa
started to give results and in the ever lightening wind
we rose from the tenth position to a narrow lead, having
sailed delightfully through the entire fleet.
During the first night the wind was light and unstable,
the spinnakers rose before morning and we were nicely
in the leading group. In the small hours we had to make
a big decision whether to take the southern route and
seek more force from the Gulf Stream and the possibly
Interpersona Newsletter 5/2005
”We didn’t win a medal but are happy and proud of our achievement”
The struggle for the lead was hard – in the end SAIC La
Jolla took the fifth placing in the race.
better winds that seemed to be arriving from the south
a couple of days later. All the others headed to the
more conservative, northern and straighter route. We
took the risk and headed south.
First place turned into last place
In the short term we couldn’t expect but defeats from
our lonely choice of route and that was also the case.
The nerves of everyone was put on a test as the good
positioning of the first night rapidly changed into a
jumbo placement and the distance to the rest of the
group only grew bigger. Finally a couple of days later
we started to see the light in the end of the tunnel.
We got new winds from south and sat in a favorable
current of almost two knots in the whirls near the Gulf
Stream. First we rose from the twelfth position to the
seventh and already during the following six hours to
the lead. Finally we increased the lead to almost 50 sea
miles and everything seemed to be going really ideally.
The risky part of our tactics was planned to end at
Waypoint Charlie, towards which everybody directed
their bow for the first little less than 1000 miles. From
there onwards it was obvious that the northern route
would be faster and more secure, we wanted to assure
our victory at this point and stay between the ones
behind and La Rochelle, defending our lead. But the
winds chose otherwise.
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