How can I connect to a seed that another peer seems to connect to?

[vkleojv]

I would like to suggestions about how to connect to the seed, or understand why I am unable to connect to it.

I have been downloading an old, now poorly seeded torrent for days; it is a large torrent and I selected all files. The estimated completion is several months.

During this time: The detailed info's Trackers tab shows 1 Seed and 2 Peers. When I copy the peer list I see that there are two distinct IP addresses. I am almost always connected to the other peer but never to the seed. It seems that the peer is getting pieces from somewhere--I suspect the seed--because the peer's Relevance stays at 0.1 and I continue to get pieces from the peer. (The peer's Relevance is 0.1 but for some odd reason the peer's % goes is 0.0 up to maybe 0.4, but all of my 10.2% came from this peer--the peer's client is Vuze 5.0.0.0--maybe Vuze is reporting % wrongly.) The peer is basically sending me the middles of files but missing most first/last pieces that are shared with other files, so I increased the priority of these files to attempt to complete them, but the increased priority will not do any good until I get a connection to the seed that will report the pieces as available.

Another benefit of connecting to the seed is that the estimated completion time should be cut in half if there are two of us downloading from the seed and us peers are sharing what we get from the seed. So I now want to connect to the seed too. I would understand it if neither of us peers were getting any pieces from the seed, but not why the other peer can and I cannot.

My uTorrent is 3.3. The status icon is a green circle with a checkmark in it. The Protocol Encryption Outgoing is Enabled. The other downloading and uploading torrents each show several connections.

[DreadWingKnight]

Make sure your client is reachable and WAIT.

[ktetch]

Another benefit of connecting to the seed is that the estimated completion time should be cut in half if there are two of us downloading from the seed and us peers are sharing what we get from the seed.

You assume of course, that the seed has unused bandwidth to send to you, and isn't already maxed out on multiple torrents. In which case you've not sped anything up.