A Chinese is when the stern of the boat moves into the wind.
It happens when the top of the sail goes onto the other side, but the boom stays in the side it was already. Its nasty, but mostly created by low boom jack tension and allowing the boom to raise, as happens when boats jump in the water (which was the case).
I don't know if I can post this, but here is Andreas Hanakamp's report on it. (Cam if I can't delete it).
He was right, on the wheel the boat felt much better than in the navstation, so we kept going, more aggressive when the breeze was down, conservative when the breeze was up. A cloud
line brought the wind up to 42 knots and the speed topped out well over 30 knots and we got ready to drop the kite. By the time we were ready, the breeze had gone down to 35 knots and everything was fine. At the watch change, I handed the wheel over to Stig (Westergaard/DEN) and I went for the grinder to assist Wouter (Verbraak – navigator). As before, we were submerged from time to time when the boat shot through massive waves.
Facing aft on the grinder, I heard Stig screaming ‘we Chinese’ as the boat slowed down almost to a standstill up to the mast in solid green. Then everything went into slow motion, not a violent knock down but the boat slowly turning, heeling more and more over to the wrong side, the boom high up in the air until coming over and the kite flying around the forestay to the new leeward side and flapping in the 35 knots breeze. Fate was inexorable, nothing left to be done, but wait for the inevitable. The stack of sails on the aft starboard corner of the boat was under water, the starboard spreader camera as well as the keel and the sails were holding the boat on 90 degrees to its designed floatation.
I climbed the vertical deck (as I normally climb rock) to free the runner, Wouter handed me a knife to cut free the lashing, Cam (Camron Wills/RSA) pulling the runner tail and Oleg (Zherebtsov/RUS) grinding it. Meanwhile, Jeremy (Elliot/IRL) and Mikey (Mike Joubert/RSA) managed to get the keel moving to the other side to righten up the boat again.
Once up, the boat accelerated to 15 knots and all on deck got to the foredeck to take town the A6 that had meanwhile wrapped around the headstay. Once this sail had gone inside, we gybed Kosatka back, got the Q9 out of the bag, had another little issue as it unfurled before it should, unreefed the main and were back on track.
Nobody got hurt, only the pulpit is bent and quite ugly, no other damage (Thanks Rob for the strong boat!). Mark (Covell MCM) managed to record some of it on video, so watch this programme in the near future.
Volvo Ocean Race: Team Russia’s big broach - Australian Sailing News - YACHTe.com.au
'Liberty' Citation 34
