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9:28 PM Wed 12 Nov 2008 GMT
'Can we have the icebergs back?' joked Bouwe Bekking, the skipper of Telefonica Blue. It's not a common request, but then the challenges of the new route are not particularly common either.
Instead of dodging icebergs and braving Southern Ocean storms, the crews lining up for the forthcoming Volvo Ocean Race leg to Cochin, India - and indeed the two further trips through Asia after that - are taking measures to ensure the threats of piracy and collisions with small unlit fishing vessels are minimised.
'It's a step into the unknown for all of us,' said PUMA Ocean Racing skipper Ken Read. 'The ocean arena we usually race in will now be the real world. We need to prepare right so we know what to do to avoid problems.'
The focal point of preparations was a briefing in the V&A Waterfront this morning. There, in front of almost every sailor in the fleet, Graeme Gibbon Brooks of Dryad Maritime, an intelligence service, briefed the crews on what lies ahead over the next three legs.
'There are places you are going to which could prove problematic,' he explained. 'There are a places where a piracy threat exists and there are also challenges of avoiding other boats. The purpose of this briefing is advice on how to avoid a situation and what to do if you can't.'
In real terms, the threat of piracy was listed as 'less than 1%' by Brooks, but, as Race Director Jack Lloyd said, 'you need to have a level of awareness'.
As it stands, the areas of most concern are the waters off the coast of Somalia, the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca, the stretch of water between west Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra that will come into play on leg three.
To tackle the threat, the Race Committee has added a leg two scoring waypoint below Mauritius and an exclusion zone above to keep the fleet east and away from Somalia, where yesterday a Philippines chemical tanker with 23 crew was hijacked. According to the International Maritime Bureau, of the 199 recorded acts of piracy worldwide in the first nine months of the year 63 occurred in the waters off Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden.
It is a different situation in the Strait of Malacca, which between 1984 and 2007 averaged 20 reported piracy incidents a year, but is at its safest level in five years.
'For the second leg we are reasonably far away from the risk area for Somalia,' said Ericsson 3 skipper Anders Lewander. 'There are other areas that we will come into for legs three and four, but that is why we are here, learning what we do about it.'
To that end, Lloyd has also started discussions into the possibility of placing waypoints into the course to keep the fleet away from unnecessary risks.
'We are just making as much information available as we can so they can be as prepared as possible for the coming legs,' he said. 'We have thoroughly considered the option of waypoints and we will use it but it will be done on a leg by leg basis.'
The fleet will also make use of the UK Maritime Trade Organisation (UKMTO) based in Dubai. The positions of the boats will be passed to UKMTO every three hours to be fed into a database passed out to warships who will know where all of them are. Likewise, the race has retained the services of Control Risks and Dryad, who cover risk assesment and maritime intelligence respectively.
'It's good that the organisation has put these things in place,' added Lewander. 'It is really good to open up awareness of the situation but we also have to look at the true risks, which are not that great.'
The greatest concerns going forward appear to revolve around the possibility of other water traffic. 'One thing we are particularly worried about is the chance of hitting one of these small wooden fishing vessels that are hard to detect,' Read said. 'As we are hearing, there are so many of these boats in some of the areas we visit that you can almost walk from coast to coast on them.
'It could mean we are going quarter speed just to get through it and (we end up with) three nets on our keel. We are going to have to be smart, use common sense and we need to understand as a group that we are in this together. If there is a situation out there that we do not like we are going to have to agree as a group to share information rather than using it as a tactical situation.'
It's all very different to a blast through the Southern Ocean, but, as Read says, 'It's not meant to be easy'.
www.volvooceanrace.org
by Volvo Ocean Race media
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