The Whitbread Round the World Race never ceases to amaze. Within a day of the re-start from Cape Town, Gunnar Krantz's Swedish Match is 50 miles ahead of the rest of the fleet and still pulling away. And there is seemingly no end to their good fortune, as a ridge of high pressure appears ready to favour them. Paul Cayard, winner of the first leg with EF Language, described it as "a rich-get-richer syndrome". The ridge should lighten the wind most for those to the north, which means everyone but Krantz.
Swedish Match took off to the south, after the circuit of three marks laid for the benefit of television, when all the rest stayed inshore. "It is a move that I would never, ever have made in those conditions,' said David Abromowitz, a former Commodore of the Royal Cape Yacht Club and one of its best sailors. So much for local knowledge.
Krantz held a different view. Although he admitted that "we had promised ourselves that we stay with the fleet no matter what happened", he heeded advice to stay at least two miles offshore at Signal Hill.
When the rest went inshore they met with very fickle breezes off Seapoint and in Camps Bay and were "parked" while the bluehulled Swedish Match picked up her own breeze and was out of sight in an hour.
The others could afford to let her go. She finished eighth on the first leg and was well down, therefore, on the points score; they had to consider each other more closely.
It was a struggle to break clear and for over an hour the boats were going nowhere. Cayard and the EF Language crew were next to pick up the breeze out of Camps Bay and they have a healthy 16-mile lead over Silk Cut. The next two out were Silk Cut and Mark Fischer's Chessie Racing, and they are less than a couple of miles apart in third and fourth places, with Grant Dalton's Merit Cup staging a recovery from last to fifth.
Dalton was utterly dismayed: "If we had tried to muck up the first six hours more, we would have struggled," he admitted.
"We are still reeling on board at the severity and the suddenness of what happened and I only hope in the days to come we can repair the damage `in miles'."
