It has been a day for fire and water onboard almost all the boats racing in the closing stages of the Volvo Ocean Race leg two to Melbourne.

“Water and electronics don’t like each other so much,” wrote Bouwe Bekking from third placed movistar tonight. “We have a tiny leak in the mainsheet winch so Capey (Andrew Cape) had built a cover underneath it to collect the drops of water. But as the boat was bouncing so much, the water flew over the top of the cover right onto one of the computer screens. Computer toasted.”

In second place, ABN AMRO TWO (Sebastien Josse) had an electrical fire in the nav station. “I came downstairs and there was smoke everywhere. Luckily we were able to switch everything off and put the fire out in time. The next job was to get the electronics up and running again. In the meantime, the boys were just steering off the regular compass. We had to get the computer to talk to the instruments so that I could find out where we were, which we managed to do.

“At the moment we are just missing a few things like our messaging terminal, our Sat C and also one of our compasses has gone down,” said a very relaxed Simon Fisher, casually adding: “For quite a while the whole boat was live and if you touched anything electrical, you got 24 volts through you. The problem with electrical fires is that it is quite hard to tell where the cause is.”

Fisher was confident that the damage to the instruments was not serious and would not affect the boat’s performance in the approach to Melbourne.

The Pirates on The Black Pearl have spent a lot of today plugging leaks. Cayard said, “We were taking on a fair amount of water through our keel pins which have gotten loose due to the structural damage we have.”

The dismasting of Brasil 1 (Torben Grael) has shattered his crew. “Unfortunately, as the start of the next leg is not so far away, we won’t be able to finish this one, and the dream of many of us to sail effectively around the world will not come true,” wrote Grael this afternoon, although the yacht is still racing and has not official retired from this leg. “Now we are back sailing under jury rig. The speed is not great, but it’s what we can get under these circumstances. The boat movement is hard and uncomfortable; everyone is tired and disappointed, but already thinking about the future.”

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