{"id":493,"date":"2012-04-07T12:48:26","date_gmt":"2012-04-07T12:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/?p=493"},"modified":"2012-04-09T13:06:48","modified_gmt":"2012-04-09T13:06:48","slug":"puma-win-auckland-to-itajai-leg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/2012\/04\/puma-win-auckland-to-itajai-leg\/","title":{"rendered":"Puma Powered By BERG Win Tough Volvo Ocean Race Leg."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Volvo Ocean Race<\/a> Leg from Auckland to\u00a0Itajai, Brazil was one of the most dramatic yet, with boats being pushed to, and in some cases beyond, their limits by the formidable Southern Ocean conditions.<\/p>\n

PUMA Ocean Racing<\/a> powered by BERG held off two challengers in a tactical match race to win Leg 5 of the Volvo Ocean Race. \u00a0The 11-member crew onboard PUMA\u2019s Mar Mostro crossed the line at 16:09.51 local\/19:09.51 UTC on Friday, April 6, finishing the leg in 19 days, 18 hours, 9 minutes and 50 seconds. It marked the first leg win of this year\u2019s race for the PUMA team.<\/p>\n

Skipper Ken Read said:<\/p>\n

\u201cUnbelievable! Nobody quit and the atmosphere on the boat today was really cool \u2013 laid back and everybody was ready to tackle the task at hand. I\u2019m very proud of this team. It\u2019s a great feeling.<\/p>\n

The shore team \u2013 along with the boat builders and design team \u2013 they\u2019re the unsung heroes here. They deserve equal billing, especially in a leg like this,\u201d Read continued. \u201cBefore the leg started, we had a goal and a strategy as to how we were going to approach it and what our priorities were. We stayed true to that, and I\u2019m very proud of that fact. And, my heart goes out to all of the teams with problems this leg \u2013 we know exactly how they feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the win, PUMA<\/a> added 30 points to bring the team\u2019s overall race total to 113. Team Telef\u00f3nica crossed the line a close second to PUMA in Leg 5, finishing just 12 minutes behind and boosting their overall race total to 147. Two teams remain poised to complete the leg after suffering damage during the leg \u2013 the Groupama Sailing Team and CAMPER with Emirates Team New Zealand. The Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing and Team Sanya both retired from the leg after also suffering damage.<\/p>\n

The team traveled approximately 7,500 nautical miles from Auckland to Itaja\u00ed. Following the relentless Southern Ocean stretch of more than 12 days, PUMA rounded Cape Horn at 13:52 UTC on March 30. With most of the fleet suspended from racing due to damage, PUMA and Groupama began the northerly journey to Brazil in a match race, sailing head-to-head until Groupama suffered an unfortunate dismasting. Telef\u00f3nica soon resumed racing and caught up to within a mile of PUMA by the final day.<\/p>\n

Navigator Tom Addis said:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe leg went on and on. It was an all-around leg. There was the Southern Ocean, which of course is full-on preservation mode. Then, once you round the corner there was a lot of tactical racing, a lot of light air. We\u2019ve got great experience on this boat \u2013 guys like Brad [Jackson] and Tony [Mutter] just knowing when to push and when not to push. Sometimes you\u2019re not racing at anywhere near 100 percent, but that\u2019s fine because you\u2019re not very fast when you\u2019re broken. It was a good leg to win.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Racing resumes in Itaja\u00ed with the Pro Am Race on Friday, April 20, followed by the In-Port Race on Saturday, April 21, and the start of Leg 6 to the lone U.S. stop of Miami, Florida, on Sunday, April 22.<\/p>\n

More quotes from Ken Read:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to get a little lucky. It\u2019s easy to sit here and toot your horn as to how you sailed the boat. But, that one wave that we were almost airborne on, could have been 2 seconds later, and maybe we would have been airborne. We had a great dogfight going with Groupama and they were sailing really well. We felt horrible for them because we knew exactly how they felt.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur intentions always have been to go out there and win. It\u2019s been great that we\u2019ve been on the podium quite often, but it\u2019s been disappointing that we haven\u2019t won a leg so far. We think we deserve this leg win, and we\u2019re proud of it. We\u2019re going to celebrate it for a bit, then get right back to work because there\u2019s a lot more sailing to be done.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Volvo Ocean Race Leg from Auckland to\u00a0Itajai, Brazil was one of the most dramatic yet, with boats being pushed to, and in some cases beyond, their limits by the formidable Southern Ocean conditions. PUMA Ocean Racing powered by BERG held off two challengers in a tactical match race to win Leg 5 of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[237],"tags":[459,460,457,428,400,281,458],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-volvo-ocean-race","tag-auckland","tag-brazil","tag-ken-read","tag-new-zealand","tag-puma","tag-puma-ocean-racing","tag-tom-addis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":497,"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions\/497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yachtracing.biz\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}