Irish team suffers damage from lobster pot en route to Galway

The seventh leg of the Volvo Ocean Race, which finishes at Galway, has particular signifigance to the Irish team Green Dragon. However, the leg has not been kind to the team so far: cold, wet conditions have prevailed and a mishap with a lobster pot dropped the boat to the back of the pack.
From The Irish Times:

Disaster struck when we sailed past one which hadn’t had its line properly weighted down. Within seconds it had severed our port daggerboard and jammed itself there. The guys quickly swung into action with knives and boat hooks trying to grab the lines and cut the pots free of our rudders, keel and both daggerboards as we dropped our headsail and came to a standstill.

Unfortunately the port daggerboard was unusable, so we had to remove it and replace it with the upturned starboard board – which is quite a feat when you’re trying to do this at sea. We worked constantly down below for hours to get it fixed. It’s not perfect, but it should get us to Galway.

That one encounter with the lobster pot cost us about 15 miles to our opposition.

By Ocean Navigator