| By Susan McKenzie The Brazilians arrived at the dory transition in good spirits, due largely to their full bellies.
“We met a man on the road and he told us a place to get breakfast,” says Fabrizio Giovannini. “It was a little bed and breakfast, and they cooked us everything.”
“We had the Pirate’s Breakfast,” adds Marina Verdini. “Eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, potatoes everything.”
“But no time for pancakes,” laments Giovannini.
Ahead of the Brazilians, a handful of teams took advantage of the favourable winds to sail into the CP at the end of the dory row.
“That was very sleepy,” The North Face’s Nicola MacLeod says as she waits on her bike by the side of the road for teammates Chris McSweeny and Ski Sharp to finish checking the maps. “The winds were so good, we just let the sail push us in, and that put me right to sleep.
The North Face seems to have gotten a lot of sleep on this race, not all of it planned.
“On the first night the fog rolled in and we decided to have a bit of a sleep,” says MacLeod. “We slept FOUR hours, so that meant we missed the dark zone cut off and fell way behind.”
“I feel a bit like we’re racing the “B” course now,” says Dave Hitchon of Team Spirit. “The teams that made the dark zone are in one race, and we’re all in another.”
Spirit is also a bit frustrated by the dark zone penalty assessed to the French team EADS. It arrived at the end of the first kayak leg eleven minutes past the nine pm cut-off, but was given a penalty rather than disqualified.
“We were just in the bay, not far from the CP, but we pulled off,” says Chris Koch. “We would have kept paddling if we had known it would just be a penalty.
Spirit’s Dave Hitchon gave himself a penalty, too, by putting the wrong tires on his bike.
Geez, I don’t even like using slicks on pavement, and here I was bashing through the bush on them. I took a lot of spills, went right over my handlebars once, too.”
Sierra International’s Ian Edmonds found the bike leg to the dorys something of a messy endeavour as well. “It was soft shingle, really hard to cycle on and hard to push your bike through,” he says.
By contrast, the Kiwis found the dory row fairly speedy. With Ian Edmonds using a kayak paddle as a rudder, Rachel Barton rowed most of the way.
“Yeah, she made the mistake of telling us she used to row,” says Julian Minehan. | 
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