The Cape Town reality: itchy hands and sore legs
Grant Dalton blogs on itchy hands and legs that hurt ….
I am in Auckland and the CAMPER boys are now in Cape Town. It’s hard to judge how they are feeling down a Skype line. The things I remember though are that for the first 24 hours after arriving you have boundless energy, walking to the hotel even though it seems like a long way and the following day your feet and legs hurt.
Your hands were swollen for most of the leg so now as the swelling starts to subside they get really itchy. Same with your feet as they have most likely been wet for days and now start to dry out and if it’s been cold, thaw out as well. You crave sweet things, well I did anyway.
You fall straight into a normal sleep pattern; you don’t wake up every few hours and on day two ashore you still have huge energy but by now you are feeling a little “spacey”. By day three you are shattered!
So what’s the point in saying this? Well it is simply that for a number of days you are not functioning normally, physically or mentally, and although decisions need to be made, often big ones, the guys need to “double check” those in their minds because of the reasons above.
Leg one was OK for CAMPER, but as has been well documented, 12 hours after the exit from the Med there was a mistake, a dither if you like, on whether to go west or south to deal with the weather situation at the time.
Nico and the boys then had 6000 miles to think about that, hour after hour, position report after position report. Don’t think for one second that they didn’t think about it every minute. They would have played the “what if” in their heads a thousand times.
OK, but it’s done, moves will be taken to address this process that allowed the “dither” to take place. There is seldom such a thing as a perfect leg. It’s a matter ofy who makes the fewest mistakes. Teams will get off the mat once, maybe a good team will get up twice, but not three times.
For three teams they have had one strike now (a DSQ). They can’t afford two or they won’t win the race. Telefonica sailed a perfect leg, we sort of started to swing at the ball but stopped so no strike one for us, just a nervous twitch.
But one thing is for sure, we are all chasing Telefonica now, the class of 2011 to date.
GRANT
