The editors at Scuttlebutt do such a great job of pulling together reports from racing events - such as the Volvo Ocean Race - that it is hard not to just cut and paste from them.  And today, as your editor/commodore recovers from post election frivolity that's exactly what I am going to do.

From the great writers at Scuttlebutt:

DOCKSIDE ASSESSMENTS
With all eight boats competing in the Volvo Ocean Race now in Cape Town following the finish of the 6500nm first leg from Spain to South Africa, teams will be focusing on three areas: repairing the boats, assessing performance, and making adjustments. During the leg, most of the information that is available on the race website is not made available to the teams. While the positions for each boat are available, the performance and weather data are not, nor are the emails or videos that are being sent from each boat. However, the onshore teams have collected all the data, and now is the time it is used to raise the level of each team before the start of the 4,450nm second leg from Cape Town to
Cochin, India begins November 15th. Here are some of the early dockside reports:

* Johnny Smullen, Green Dragon Shore Manager, regarding the collision that took the boat speed from 25 knots to a virtual standstill: “We immediately asked ourselves, what did they hit, was it a container on the surface? Perhaps a log or the whole tree! As we stood on the dock in anticipation this morning, we were somewhat relieved to see that structurally we survived. The steel keel and bearings were intact without any crazing and/or cracks; what didn’t survive was the carbon fibre fairing which fairs the leading edge of the keel. In short, the keel is milled out of a single billet of heat treated steel, and the forward and trailing edges are added later as these shapes would almost be impossible to machine. We added pre-shaped fairings to these areas and fortunately the forward one also doubles up as a sacrificial leading edge or simply put a bumper.

"Unfortunately once you lose this you have a flat section across the front of your keel which really impacts your speed! We also lost the keel pin fairing; this is a conical fairing, which does exactly that, it fairs the 150mm keel pin, and without these we have a very unfair underwater profile. It would have the same effect, if a Formula 1 car lost all its wings and the nose!” -- Photos: http://www.greendragonracing.com/en/image_gallery/category/C19

NOTE: It is my sincere hope that they didn't hit a large marine mammal (LIKE A WHALE) and are keeping it quite due to the conservation message that the race had been trying to weave into their marketing of the event (Where did it go?)

* Roger Nilson, Telefonica Black Navigator, regarding their performance: “We have learned that we have a boat which is very fast power reaching and in light air, but we have problems with our speed broad reaching and running in medium and hard conditions. Before the Canary Islands, we found ourselves left behind by Green Dragon, Puma and Ericsson 3 when sailing close to them. The frustration of lacking downwind speed probably led to our mistake going west of the Canaries.

“We came out from the Doldrums perfectly (day 10, 20 October) and made big gains on the leading three boats, but at Salvador we all began sailing more open wind angles and our speed problem came back as an old nightmare. This lack of down wind speed became even more obvious when the wind picked up and Ericsson 3 came flying past from behind. So did our friends on Telefónica Blue, but not as fast
as Ericsson 3, but still faster than us.

“It felt very frustrating to lose these two places on pure lack of boat speed.
We pushed as hard as we could, but they just passed us. At the same time, we noticed that the three front-runners also had speeds we could not match. After all this frustration, the rudder just broke for unknown reasons and the story was all over. We were limping behind the whole fleet.” --
http://tinyurl.com/5nqhq2

Finishing order for the 6500nm Leg One from Alicante, Spain to Cape Horn, South
Africa:
1. Ericsson 4, Torben Grael, Finished Nov. 2, 05:54:00 GMT
2. PUMA, Ken Read, Finished Nov. 2, 17:44:50 GMT
3. Ericsson 3, Anders Lewander, Finished Nov. 3, 04:08:50 GMT 4. Green Dragon, Ian Walker, Finished Nov. 3, 07:12 GMT 5. Telefonica Blue, Bouwe Bekking, Finished Nov. 3, 11:18:37 GMT
6. Team Russia, Andreas Hanakamp, Finished Nov. 3, 15:29:47 GMT 7. Delta Lloyd, Ger O'Rourke, Finished Nov. 3, 23:03 GMT 8. Telefonica Black, Fernando Echavarri, Finished Nov. 4, 16:43 GMT

Overall Leaderboard (Provisional)1. Ericsson 4, 14 points 2. PUMA, 13 points 3. Green Dragon, 11 points 4. Telefónica Blue, 10 points 5. Telefónica Black, 7 points 6. Ericsson 3, 5 points*7. Delta Lloyd, 4 points 8. Team Russia, 4 points *Scoring penalty: http://tinyurl.com/illegal-keel
Scoreboard: http://www.volvooceanrace.org/rdc/#tab4