Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2008/January 2009 | Page 60

life

ON THE WATER

Record-breaking Salter brothers
lead Volvo Ocean Race
Jules and Guy Salter, two brothers from
Gurnard, have just stepped ashore from
Ericsson 4 in Cape Town after winning leg
one of the Volvo Ocean Race, which started
from Alicante on 11 October. Not only that,
they smashed the world record for sailing
over 600 nautical miles in 24 hours and
evacuated a crewmember along the way.
The 24-day leg from Alicante to Cape
Town, the ‘tavern of the seas’, was full of
incident for the Salter’s team, who are racing
together for the first time. Eight days after
the start, when in second position, one
of their 10 crew, Tony Mutter from New
Zealand, was found to have a poisoned
knee. It was serious.
“We gave Tony an aesthetic and proceeded
to suck some of the fluid off using a syringe.
Then we stuck the knife in – well carefully

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cut the infected area with a scalpel,”
describes fellow crewman, Phil Jameson.
“After that, we bandaged him up and sent
him to his bunk for 24 hours.”
The makeshift medical attention did
not work and Jules Salter, the navigator
onboard, had to make the tricky decision
to peel away from the fleet, losing valuable
miles, to rendezvous with a fishing vessel at
the Cape Verde Islands, to transfer Mutter,
who was later taken to hospital. Guy
Salter, the embedded journalist onboard,
recorded the whole operation from start
to finish, including the crew’s attempts to
drain fluid from Mutter’s knee prior to his
evacuation.
The team was already quite close to
the Cape Verde islands, which made a
convenient drop-off point, but the team

wasted hours drifting, waiting for the fishing
boat to arrive. When it was finally located,
Mutter put on his survival suit, jumped
overboard and swam the 100 metres to the
waiting vessel. Jules reckons the team lost
about 50 nautical miles during the detour.
For the next week, the crew pushed hard to
climb back up the leaderboard, and made it
back to pole position on day 15, 25 October.
With a 40-knot westerly ga le forecast, the
crew was preparing for the worst.
“There has been a lot of activity onboard
today, with everyone triple checking their
areas, ready for the mighty kicking we are
about to receive, “ wrote Guy on day 16.
“After all, it would be a shame to get some
gear damage and lose our chance at a shot
of a podium finish,” he said.
“Oh, to be in three places at once,”

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