It would be almost funny if it wasn’t so terrible.

Despite months of intense preparation, not one but two of the Volvo Open 70s in the six-boat Volvo Ocean Race (VOR) fleet had to suspend racing just hours after the start of the first leg in Alicante, Spain.

The first to head drop-out was Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing’s Azzam, following a dismasting just three hours after the start. The second was China’s Team Sanya, after the vessel sustained serious damage to its bow about six hours into the race.

In both cases the cause was severe weather in the Mediterranean, with 40-plus knots of wind on the nose and seas of 15 feet or more. Azzam returned to Alicante, where the Abu Dhabi support team immediately set about stepping a spare mast in the hopes of re-launching this Thursday. Unfortunately, the damage to Team Sanya is so extensive that even being able to rejoin the fleet for the second leg from Cape Town, South Africa to Abu Dhabi is in doubt.

“We were very happy with our progress, managing the big breeze and waves very nicely. We were not pushing 100 percent and had decided to throttle back a knot or so given the conditions,” says Team Sanya skipper Mike Sanderson. “We suddenly felt a very odd lurch, like dragging the keel through soft mud. We could hear the noise of water coming into the bow. The watertight doors were already shut, thankfully. For sure if [they] had not been shut, we would have been sunk. We got the pumps going but they were not really making much difference.”

At press time, Team Sanya was still assessing both the extent of the damage and the chances of its rejoining the fleet in South Africa. “The repair is no small task. We have to chop out a large section of the boat and replace it. Normally a two- to three-week job, we will have to shoehorn it into seven days. But this is the Volvo Ocean Race and we will do what we have to do to make it happen,” Sanderson says. “Our worst-case scenario is that we ship to Cape Town but are not able to fix it in time, meaning we are late starting from Cape Town and consequently miss the ship from our stop point during the second leg.”

As for Azzam, which won the opening in-port race just days earlier, the initial shock of the dismasting quickly gave way to an almost grim determination to do whatever it takes to get back in the game.

“I don’t think anyone is expecting us to launch out of here and take three or four days off the other guys,” says Abu Dhabi skipper Ian Walker. “Having said that, the weather is a funny thing and we have seen it before in other races where people stop or start late and actually benefit from the weather. Right now the weather is not looking particularly kind for us so we will just do what we always do and get there as quick as we can."

Aboard the other four boats in the fleet, gear-busting conditions soon gave way to frustratingly light airs soon after emerging from the Straits of Gibraltar into the open Atlantic. In what will undoubtedly be a recurring theme in the 2011-12 VOR, the competition has been incredibly close, with the four boats repeatedly swapping the lead.

“So we are finally back in the ocean, what we were built for,” says Puma Ocean Racing powered by Berg skipper Ken Read aboard Mar Mostro. “All four boats remaining are surely a bit lonely without our other two broken companions, but we are in sight of each other this morning [on day 3] which I guess isn’t a shock to anyone.”

Since, Read’s report, however, Franck Cammas’s Groupama has split with the other three boats, hugging the African shore in search of a land breeze while the rest of the fleet heads farther offshore.

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