Well Done to the Green Dragon in the Volvo ocean Race. 3rd place finish for the Green Dragon and 5th place for Limerick owned Delta Lloyd. Home crowd in Galway delighted.

Aran Islands

The Volvo Ocean race to Galway is speeding up. The boats are now really moving downwind.

Delta Lloys is in a strong position in 3rd and Green dragon is not far behind in 5th.

Check out the latest positions HERE

Aran Islands

Delta lloyd moves into 2nd place. Some clever tacking by The Limerick owned Delts Lloyd has seen the boat move to 2nd position in the Volvo Ocean race Boston to Galway leg. Meanwhile Green Dragon moves to 4th in the fleet.

POS	BOAT	DTLC	PTTL	DTF
1		0	00:00:00	1863
2		3	00:14:56	+3
3		3	00:19:42	+4
4		37	00:49:00	+10
5		1	00:59:50	+12
6		-2	01:11:16	+15
7		-4	01:15:19	+16
DNS		DNS	DNS	D

POS	BOAT	DTLC	PTTL	DTF
1		0	00:00:00	1894
2		0	00:45:10	+8
3		0	00:52:28	+9
4		0	01:05:46	+12
5		0	01:11:39	+13
6		0	01:26:28	+15
7		0	03:23:57	+35
DNS		DNS	DNS	DNS

These are the latest positions as the fleet in the Volvo Ocean race makes its way across the atlantic to Galway. Delta Lloyd have moved through the fleet and Green Dragon trails some 35 miles behind.

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Sunday, 17 May 2009, 17:37 GMT

Below is an email from Ian Walker on board Green Dragon

Green Dragon – Ian Walker (Skipper)

Why did I have to mention the threat of lobster pots yesterday? Today as we rounded Cape Sable off the Southern tip of Nova Scotia we were confronted by hundreds of them and to make matters worse, it was low tide and the lines were slack with little or no pattern.

After zig zagging our way through with a lookout forward we eventually hooked one on our leeward daggerboard. Five minutes later we had three of them entangling us. After backing down and clearing two of them we realised one line had sawn its way through the leading edge of the port daggerboard. We managed to raise the board and cut it free but we are left with a 250 cut in the laminate of our daggerboard one metre up from the tip. The rope we hit must have been over a metre below the surface!

We cannot leave the board in this state or the laminate will peel away and the board will start to disintegrate. Right now the watch system is on hold and we have four teams of people working onboard. Two people are sailing the boat as fast as they can with no daggerboards, three people led by Neal are working to repair the damaged board down below and three people led by Damian are working to swap the windward board end-for-end into the leeward case and two people are eating or resting.

Hopefully we will have the daggerboards reversed and can sail at 100% in the next hour and the port daggerboard can hopefully be fixed before we have to go upwind. This is a big disappointment as we were in sight of 5 boats and sailing well. We can only hope that we don’t lose touch with the fleet and live to fight another day.

Got to go and help.