Eastbayri.com

While Ken Read and crew were limping toward South Africa last week, Bristol’s Hall Spars and Rigging was hustling to get a replacement for Mar Mostro’s broken mast shipped to Cape Town.

The failure of team Puma’s mast in the mid-South Atlantic was a stunner both for the sailors and for the Bristol company that built the towering carbon fiber rig.

Mar Mostro was sprinting along at 20 to 25 knots on Nov. 21, trying to eat away at around-the-world race leader Telefonica’s slim 20-mile lead when it all came apart.

“The day started off simply enough,” said Mr. Read, a Seekonk native and Newport resident. “It was a great ride due south ... average speeds in the low 20s. Making tracks ...We were racing, the boat was ripping. Then, in one brief moment, we started surviving.”

The crew had just put a reef in the sail when “our world came crashing down around us.

“The very last thing I thought of that day was we have to be careful of our mast,” Mr. Read said. “This boat (built at Portsmouth’s New England Boatworks) and everything on it was built to push and we were pushing. Nothing out of hand, but we were certainly pushing.

“Wake up racing, go to sleep 2,500 miles from where you need to be with a 15-foot stump for a mast and a storm jib and storm trysail lashed to it going 2.8 knots. Wondering when food will run out and how to use the limited amount of diesel fuel that is on board ... Trying to think clearly because we are in the middle of freakin’ nowhere.”

A nearby container ship — “our new best friends” — the Maltese-flagged Zim Monaco (“the size of Providence”) with mostly Russian crew delivered diesel fuel to the broken boat, enough to keep the water maker powered and engine running.

On Saturday, Mar Mostro arrived at the isolated volcanic island of Tristan da Cunha. There the crew reports being fed well by the islanders and playing a round of golf in a field overlooking the ocean (no greens, lots of cow hazards).

“My daughter, Tory, sent me a fantastic e-mail telling me that Tristan has a population of 275 people and is literally a volcano sticking out of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean 6.5 miles wide,” Mr. Read wrote. “It is the closest point of land where we can re-supply ... No airport, no other way to get to the island except by boat.”

Once on a ship, “We will spend the next four-plus days of transport to Cape Town putting the pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together again.

“The spare mast is being flown in from the U.S. as we speak and will meet us in Cape Town. We will need to get the boat in the water as soon as we get to Cape Town to tune the rig properly in time to do the In-Port race and next leg to Abu Dhabi.”

‘Devastating’ news

“The news yesterday that Puma’s Mar Mostro lost her rig was devastating for all on the Puma team,” said Eric Hall, president of Hall Spars.

Hall workers in Bristol quickly prepared the boat’s spare mast for shipping and had it on a truck to JFK Airport in time to beat the Thanksgiving holiday ban on oversized trucks.

From New York, the mast was flown to Cape Town along with a team from Hall to handle the installation.

In the meantime, engineers are trying to figure out what caused the spar to snap since the replacement is essentially the same as the one that broke.

“Hall is working closely with the crew, the rig designer Scott Ferguson, and standing rigging supplier Southern Spars to get to the root cause of the dismasting,” Mr. Hall said. “Collectively, we will take every measure to prevent its recurrence.

“This is the same team of experts that produced the highly acclaimed rig for Telefonica in the last Volvo Race. Puma’s mast was a careful evolution of that rig and has seen tens of thousands of miles of tough service, including a transatlantic-winning effort earlier this year,” Mr. Hall said.

“We’re doing everything in our power to get Puma back in the race as quickly as possible,” he said. “ The resilience of the Puma team is extraordinary and our thoughts are with them as they make the difficult journey into port.”

Hawks finish first

Roger Williams wraps up the fall season at the top of Sailing World’s collegiate coed coaches’ poll rankings. Brown finished fifth.

In the women’s poll, Yale is first, University of Rhode Island second, Connecticut College fifth and Brown seventh.

Massa is Academic All-American

Emily Massa of Barrington, a senior at Boston College, has been named to the Intercollegiate Sailing Association’s 2011 All-Academic Sailing Team. Honorees must be key members of their team and excel at the highest academic level. Ms Massa, a major in human development, achieved a GPA of 3.878.

RWU second in Match Races

Roger Williams University finished second behind the U.S. Naval Academy in the 2011 Intercollegiate Sailing Association Match Race Nationals sailed Nov. 18 to 20 in San Francisco.

The event, raced in J/22s, included 10 teams representing all seven college sailing conferences across the nation. Match racing involves two boats racing against each other at a time.