SOUTHAMPTON sailor Simon Fisher was today due to start the most “demanding” of all the Volvo Ocean Race legs.

The fifth leg from Auckland to Itajai in Brazil was finally getting under way after being postponed from last Sunday due to Cyclone Pam.

Fisher, the navigator onboard Ian Walker’s Abu Dhabi boat, and the rest of the VOR fleet are facing a 6,776 nautical mile trek through the Southern Ocean.

It is both the longest and most volatile leg, the one that terrifies sailors as much as it excites them.

“Originally, Volvo used to have several of these legs, but now this is the only big Southern Ocean leg we do,” said Fisher. “It’s one that everyone looks forward to, with lots of fast, downwind sailing, but it’s also one that is pretty tough, because it is basically two weeks of heavy winds.

“It can get very cold. There’s a risk of seeing icebergs.

“Other legs can be tough in different ways, but this one is easily the most demanding, the hardest on the sailors.

“Just the fact that it is so cold, so relentless – it takes its toll on everyone.

“It’s the one everyone looks forward to doing, but also everyone is very relieved when you get to Cape Horn, turn left and start heading towards the sun again.”

Winds can reach 50 knots while the unending, unpredictable state of the waves also pose a huge threat.

In the previous race in 2011/12, Isle of Wight sailor Neal McDonald, now the performance director for Azzam, described days where he felt like he was stuck inside a washing machine with waves buffeting the boat from all sides.

McDonald called huge swirls, nearly half the height of the mast, the “controllable ones, nice, easy and marvellous to watch”.

The ones to worry about are rogue waves that can strike from any direction at any time.

One of the defining images of the 2011/12 race was McDonald’s boat Telefonica being hit by what he called “a one-in-20”. Such was its force, sailors were blown horizontal and had to hang on to whatever they could.

They were lucky to survive.

In the first round-the-world race, the Whitbread Race in 1973/74, three sailors died on two legs across the Southern Ocean.

Even surviving was often like a near-death experience, as Tracy Edwards recounted in her autobiography, Living Every Second.

On board the Atlantic Privateer in the 1985/86 race and sailing the same territory, but from Auckland to Uruguay, Edwards wrote: “The conditions were horrendous and I thought I was going to die.

“I’d be cooking and puking up into the sink at the same time.”

The toll on the boats has been bigger.

Rare has been the Southern Ocean leg in which the weather conditions have not damaged at least one of the fleet.

That 1985/86 race was, in fact, the first in which the entire fleet finished that leg. In the previous race, only one of the six boats completed the leg without having to stop for repairs. Two, including Azzam, did not complete the leg, and Groupama, whose mast fell, finished fourth, ten days after the winners Puma.

Azzam’s was an especially tortuous leg. Within hours of the start at Auckland, in winds of up to 40 knots, they had structural damage and were forced to return to where they had just come from for repairs.