Alex Thomson and the Hugo Boss team must have hoped their long nights were behind them but Alex and the shore team spent the entire last night, 9pm to 9am, trying to establish how bad a halyard chafe problem they had noticed actually was.
With such a short time left the only way to discover how bad it was, and to find a solution was to spend the night hoisting and lowering the loaded main halyard.
In total the team of ten, including Alex, worked hour shifts through the night in total making 1800 hoists over the 12 hour period.
The process both reduced the chafe by simply smoothing off the rough point(s) and is reported to have left only a small mark on the rope.
“It was a big effort from all the guys for more than ten hours. We did about 1800 cycles so a good replication of doing a few miles. We had some chafe on the main halyard and now it looks like some of the solutions have put in place have worked. A lot of it was just fact finding, but the main thing is just to put a different piece of rope in which Blew Stube helped us with supply, providing it almost overnight.”
“Alex did a shift, put his fair share in, he did an hour or two if not a bit more. At the start of the night there were a few more including a few experts. We just had to prove to ourself that we did not have a problem and I think we went as far as we could in doing that.” Explained the team’s rigging specialist Giles.
