Eight hundred miles south-west of Australia, deep in the Southern Ocean at Lat 47º, an exhausted Dee Caffari keeps a wakeful and anxious watch onboard Aviva.
Eight hundred miles south-west of Australia, deep in the Southern Ocean at Lat 47ş, an exhausted Dee Caffari keeps a wakeful and anxious watch onboard Aviva. She has four icebergs in visual range and each berg is two or three times the size of the boat and capable of inflicting major damage should they collide. Frustrated by light winds, all Caffari can do is keep watch and wait.
Recent events have kept solo around the world yachtswoman Dee Caffari busy, she has just completed a successful dive South-west to avoid a storm force 11 secondary low. Aviva Challenge weather router, Mike Broughton’s careful planning meant that Aviva avoided the worst of this storm but even on the edges of this depression she found herself in 60 knots, crashing through enormous waves.
During this manoeuvre there was little or no time for rest. Once beyond the storm Caffari had hoped to recoup some sleep, but her sighting of an iceberg early Friday put pay to this. Since this time she has come across a further six and is on constant look out. She is absolutely exhausted and at times feels like the whole thing is impossible.
This morning speaking to her shore team Dee Caffari, said: “I haven't slept more than a couple of hours all week due to the conditions and now I am playing Titanic. I am so tired. I just want some breeze to move so I can clear these bergs. I have been on deck all day and have tried to use the wind shifts to keep the boat moving to avoid the bergs, but I don't know how much longer I can keep this up for. I've never seen so much ice, its very worrying. I need to find a way out of here.”
Skip Novak, one of the world’s most experienced high latitude sailors commented on the potential effects of hitting a growler**. “If you hit one with a metal boat you probably wouldn’t sink it, but if you really hit a big one, like a house-size ‘bergy bit’ which is just below the surface but 20 tonnes of ice, you’d probably dismast the boat and rip the rudder off as you went by it and you’d do a lot of damage. The impact is the biggest risk.”
Aviva Challenge project director, Andrew Roberts comments on the dangers of sailing in the iceberg strewn seas, “At times like these I'm very pleased that Aviva is a strong steel yacht but it is still hazardous to be amongst the ice and even more so at night and alone. I don't recall reports of so much ice in any of the Challenge Business’ 50 crossings of the Southern Ocean. Dee is keeping watch visually and has set up a ‘guard zone’ on her radar* that will trigger an audible alarm. As a further precaution, Dee has closed off the watertight door into the forward (bow) compartment. In this situation there is little further assistance the Shore Team can give her, information on the distribution of ice in the Southern Ocean is extremely scarce compared with the North Atlantic, as there are few ships or commercial requirements for satellite observations. No accurate predictions or detailed observations are available for the area Aviva is sailing in. It will be an anxious time whilst we wait for the winds to pick up to carry Dee north out of this current danger.”
-ends-
* Aviva is equipped with a Raymarine RL 80C radar which has a range of 24 miles. The Raymarine radar has proved very effective but relatively small bits of ice can be invisible and will still do significant damage to the rudder. In most sea conditions the radar should detect icebergs with a waterline length of 10 metres or more as long as there is a significant amount of ice above the waterline.
** Growlers are smaller icebergs that are almost entirely submerged.
Enquiries:
Karen Earl Sponsorship
Georgina Spring +44 (0)7747 033728 +44 (0)1672 811588
Aviva
Sue Winston, head of group media relations +44 (0)20 7662 8221
An audio interview taken today, 4 March 2006 is available on request.
Notes to editors:
Aviva and The Aviva Challenge
- www.avivachallenge.com includes a voyage tracker, Dee’s daily logs, an image library, profiles of Dee and her shore team, the yacht Aviva and further information about The Aviva Challenge
- Aviva is sponsoring Dee Caffari’s "Aviva Challenge" as part of its "Forward thinking" pan-European advertising campaign. The print, on-line and television corporate campaign, targeting Europe’s opinion-former community, will run until April 2006. As part of the campaign, Aviva has also commissioned RSA Films to make five film shorts for CNBC TV, featuring people who have a particularly powerful vision of the future and celebrating the remarkable achievements of these individuals
- The current world record for a non-stop single-handed circumnavigation of the globe against the prevailing winds and currents is 122 days, 14 hours, 3 minutes and 49 seconds and is held by Frenchman Jean Luc Van Den Heede.
Challenge Business
- Challenge Business is the organiser for "The Aviva Challenge", co-ordinating the shore team and logistics behind Dee Caffari’s solo, non-stop circumnavigation
- Challenge Business is a market leader in creating, managing and promoting World Class events - providing the opportunity for ordinary people to do the extraordinary, for the professionals to reach for the extreme and visionary businesses to achieve amazing results
- Challenge Business uses the participation and passion of adventure sport to create integrated marketing programmes for innovative businesses and has a sponsorship community of many hundreds of blue chip companies worldwide.