11/11/2011 10:52 am

DHL to the rescue

The first leg of the 2011/2012 Volvo Ocean Race got off to a gripping start: two boats were forced to return to port. DHL leapt into action to save the race for the Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing team.

When the starting gun for the Volvo Ocean Race fired on Saturday November 5, the six competing teams left the Spanish port of Alicante with their sights set firmly on Cape Town. But within 24 hours two of the boats were in serious trouble and heading back to Spain.

All six yachts faced brutal seas while still in the Mediterranean with waves over ten meters high and winds approaching 40 knots (approx. 70 km/h). The Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing boat was the first to report difficulties. Just six hours and 85 nautical miles into the race, their mast broke into three pieces after hitting a huge wave in the middle of the night.

As Abu Dhabi motored back to shore, Team Sanya was next to call in damage to their boat’s hull. Water was flowing into the craft so the skipper suspended sailing and the ship made its way to the Spanish port of Motril to assess the problem: major damage to the bow. Repairing it will involve replacing a large piece of the hull, a job that normally takes three to four weeks. Though skipper Mike Sanderson has already retired his team from leg one, Sanya simply does not have that much time if they are to be ready for the start of leg two.

The logistics of a rescue.

Until last weekend it’s been plain sailing for DHL. The logistics behind the Volvo Ocean Race had progressed as planned: the teams’ equipment arrived on time, and the race village was in place. But once the race started, everything suddenly got a whole lot more exciting.

After the mast broke, the Abu Dhabi boat turned around right away. Now DHL’s challenge was to make sure the team’s spare mast met them at the harbor. This bulky piece of backup equipment had been in Alicante for the start of the race, but was now heading back to DHL’s Airside Warehouse in Amsterdam, where all the spare items are stored.

The truck hauling the spare mast had already made it as far as Burgos, some 660 km away. On top of that, the truck driver’s shift was over, meaning another driver needed to be found to get the mast sailing back to Alicante. This included supplying permits for oversize cargo and arranging a crane for reloading the mast onto another vehicle. And all this at two o’clock in the morning! Not an easy task, to say the least, but one that DHL has the capability to handle. The mast was reloaded at around 6 am and finally arrived at the berth in Alicante at 3 pm, only a few hours behind the Abu Dhabi Racing boat. “It was not physically possible to do it any faster,” says Rouben Broesen, Project Manager, Volvo Ocean Race Logistics at DHL. “As you can imagine, the Abu Dhabi team was delighted.” After a hasty round-the-clock team effort to re-rig the mast, the team is now back in the race.

Team’s Sanya’s boat was a whole other story. In the time it normally takes to repair hull damage of this magnitude, the team will have to both ship the vessel to Cape Town and complete the repairs if they are to make the start of leg two on December 11. The DHL team is now working hard to help provide Team Sanya with the gust of logistical wind needed to transport their damaged boat to Cape Town as fast a possible.

As if this wasn’t enough for day one of this 9-month, globe-spanning regatta, DHL was also faced with another ‘break-down’ of sorts at the race village in Alicante. The team disassembling the village had to abandon their work several times on Saturday and Sunday on account of gale force winds. In the end DHL mastered the elements and completed the job.

Meanwhile, DHL is now re-planning the transport of the Abu Dhabi and Sanya teams’ equipment to the Cape Town and Abu Dhabi stopovers. No one had anticipated such drastic boat repairs would be needed so early in the race. Now, the necessary equipment must be repacked and rerouted.

“It’s been a spectacular start to the race,” says Broesen. “Not just in terms of the sailing, but also from a logistics point of view.”

CLOSE