A Dutch team led by 51-year-old six-time veteran Bouwe Bekking led the seven-strong Volvo Ocean Race fleet out of Alicante for the start of their nine-month offshore marathon - straight into a Mediterranean storm on Saturday.
The weather forecast issued by race organisers a few hours before the 66 sailors set off would have conjured bad memories for many of the fleet.
In the last edition of the 41-year-old event, previously known as the Whitbread Round the World Race, two boats were nursed back to shore and eventually retired from the opening leg to Cape Town because of a broken mast and a delaminated bow respectively.
One of them was led by the British skipper Ian Walker who is again at the helm of Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing's boat, Azzam.
This time, all of the fleet are sailing in a one-design Volvo Ocean 65 boat which has been built for durability rather than outright speed after the 2011-12 event was marred by a string of breakages.
Bekking will join Swede Roger Nilson as the only man to have competed in seven editions of a race that is generally acknowledged in the sport as crewed sailing's toughest test.
His Team Brunel boat held a slim advantage over Walker's boat and the Spanish entrant MAPFRE sailing out of the Alicante waters watched by around 50,000 fans, according to organisers, in the race village and several deep along the Alicante shore.
The fleet will take around three weeks to reach Cape Town on a journey which will take nine months in total to complete and cover 38,739 miles of the world's most treacherous waters.
Teams from Denmark, USA/Turkey, Spain, Abu Dhabi, The Netherlands, China and Sweden are taking part.
The Swedish campaign, Team SCA, is the first all-women's crew to compete since 2001-02.
The race finishes on June 27, 2015 in Gothenburg, Sweden.
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