SAILING:Though all of us on Groupama are celebrating a podium finish with third place, it could have been so much more after all our efforts on leg five

IT’S CERTAINLY been an eventful week. After leading Puma up the Atlantic, we started our game of cat and mouse that very suddenly changed into snakes and ladders and we became the victim of the serpent when our mast tumbled down just 600 miles from the finish.

But we’ve arrived now, into Itajai and completed leg five of the Volvo Ocean Race and though all of us on Groupama are celebrating a podium finish with third place, it could have been so much more after all our effort for three weeks across the Southern Ocean from New Zealand.

We felt we had just got the upperhand as we approached Uruguay, gradually easing ahead in what had been a match-race nail-biter that denied Telefonica their fourth leg win of the race.

There was a big crash on deck and I sprinted up on deck to find probably our worst nightmare had come true with our rig in a heap, lying along the deck towards the stern and our mainsail in a big heap.

We had been sailing in about 17 knots, nice breeze nothing more and had full sail and in flat seas so there was no real reason why the rig should come down. We’re still trying to figure out the cause. Something obviously wore out but we still don’t know what yet. Needless to say there was a lot of cursing and anguish as we all saw two years’ worth of work in tatters before us. In an instant, the whole race goes through your mind.

Despite the dismasting, after about a minute of disbelief, we got into the task of dealing with the situation. Franck (Cammas – skipper) and Jean Luc (Nelias – navigator) sprinted up on deck and had a plan to head for land but still complete the leg after salvaging what we could from the broken spar. We were able to recover all our sails and secured the upper section of the mast to stop it banging against the hull and causing more serious damage.

I suppose it was our good fortune our misfortune occurred just 60 miles off the coast of Uruguay so we suspended racing and pulled into the former Whitbread round-the-world race stop-over port of Punta del Este to get a jury-rig set-up.

Thankfully nobody was injured though Brad Marsh managed to stab himself in the wrist while swinging about up the stump of the mast cutting the rigging loose. Our medic Martin Krite got to use his staple-gun to put him back together but because it was his first time using it, he needed a practice go first so had to remove the first attempt.

We left Punta on Friday evening and for the last four days we’ve looked more like a tall ship than a racing 70-footer.

Now, having crossed the finishing in third place under jury rig, it all seems a bit surreal to be on the podium. In some ways, we feel a little hard done by but others have had worse problems so we can be thankful we were within reach of land, thankful for the third place. If we had been offered a guaranteed third place in Auckland for a Southern Ocean leg, we’d have been hard pushed to refuse it and it would have been more than respectable.

But our performance and work in the Southern Ocean merited better and after leading past Cape Horn, we expected to win. First place would have been very good for us in the overall race as it would have put a buffer between us and third place while also bringing us right up to five points behind Iker Martinez on Telefonica.

Instead, while we hold second overall, we’re 20 points behind the Spaniards and the fight for third place is intensifying not far behind us between Ken Read on Puma who won the leg after an intense battle with Telefonica and Chris Nicholson on Camper who are only today expected to round Cape Horn after a stop in Chile for repairs.

Telefonica are a little further away but we’re going into a new leg next week that should also suit us so it was actually a very upbeat Groupama 4 team that crossed the finishing-line in Itajai.

We still have four legs remaining before the final in-port race in Galway to decide this event and it’s far from over. The old mantra has never been truer: in order to win, first you must finish. But before then, I’m off to Canada for a shortened visit to see Suzy-Ann, Oisín and Neave.

MAKING WAVES