The world sailing speed record council was established by international yacht racing union (now renamed the international sailing federation) In 1972. The object was to provide impartial results for increasing numbers of claims to the high speed sailing craft (on water, never on ice nor land)
The Volvo Ocean Race (formerly the Whitebread Round the World Race) is a yacht race around the worlds held every 3 years, it has been named after its current own Volvo.
Through the route is changed to accommodate various ports of call the race typically departs Europe in September or October and in recent years has had either 9 to 10 legs with in part races at many of the stopovers cities. The current race started in Alicante, Spain on October 11th 2008. the route for 2008 / 2009 race has been altered from previous years to include stopovers in the middle east and Asia for the first time. This latest route covers nearly 39,000 nautical miles, will take over nine months to complete and is expected to reach a cumulative TV audience of 2 billion world wide.
Day one of the ten Zulu race leg 1
Torben Grael and the crew of Ericsson 4 swept into the history books yesterday as the first monohull to breach the 600 mile barrier in 24 hours. The team have been chased by men machine with the elements in the last 48 hours, nothing has touched them yet.
In their foaming, boiling 25 – knot wake the fleet lies scattered as the devil and the deep blue sea picked off the hindmost one by one – the cold front sweeping over them with a mix of murderous squalls and ugly waves in a pitch black night we’re almost down to the last man standing.
At 10:00 Zulu Ken Read and his team were just over 70 miles behind Ericsson 4. That gap has been opened in the last 48 hours and it represents a bit more than five percent of the distance they have travelled in that time.
That’s a chunk of change for two boats that had been side by side for most of the leg – consider that not much more than two days ago, Ericsson 4 navigator, Jules Salter reflected in an email. “We seem to hang in there with Puma but only just, are we faster? Our perception on board is not….”
Behind the front pair, Ian walker and the Green Dragon had led the chase for 36 relentless hours – then the cold front caught them late yesterday afternoon. The wind backed (rotated anticlockwise to the west) and they elected to gybe to the south. It was the same strategy applied by team Russia and Delta Lloyd just before the Ten Zulu yesterday.
Lll five boats are now headed south east, in an squally, west south westerly breeze. The Dragons deflect to the leader is now over 200 miles. Ian Walker and his team have not had a smooth night, and from their track it looks as through every time they have gybed the wind has lifted them, forcing them to gybe back (technical content note: a lift is a shift in the wind which, when you are sailing downwind, takes you away from where you want to go – a bad thing).
And in these conditions a gybe is a 30mintue operation involving the man-handling of a couple of tonnes of equipment, as everything is moved from one side to the other.
The most amazing thing is the eyesight of some of the worlds top tacticians as they can read the breeze on the water, telling whether another boat is faster or slower, ahead or behind, and this is all from ridiculous distances, unfortantly when it gets dark a lot of that information disappears, no more patterns of waves on the water, no more clouds nor sky to watch.
Ericsson 3’s watch captain Richard Mason reported in an email that they “were in a squall for four hours and it was pitch black, absolutely no visibility at all. I couldn’t see the waves and no horizon and we had everything from 19 to 46 knots of wind …”
They had the fractional spinnaker up at the time, and Mason reflected … “we were caught with our pants down. There was never a chance to get the damn thing off! It was pretty much survive or die! And, we survived.” I was wondering yesterday who might be trying to hold the fractional spinnaker in the marginal conditions – now we know.
And Ericsson 3 have stormed up the charts over the last 48 hours, overtaking both the Telefoncia boats and Green Dragon. Behind PUMA, they’ve done the best job of hanging onto their sister ship. And they’ve done it despite an ongoing flirtation with the cold front – they were already in the group going north of east yesterday morning.
And again, they were north-west of Green Dragon when she gybed to the south yesterday. And yet somehow, (to Ian Walker’s confusion in the above email) as Aksel Magdahl relates in an email this morning, they have managed to keep the boat pointed east at the finish (and the word on the street is that the keel will be changed in Cape Town). But although they are closer to the finish, they’ve ended up further north than the chasing group, and that could be important in the home straight.
With a whole host of different elements causing a few problems for all the teams involved such as broken sails.
The conditions will finally ease in the next 24hours as the low begins to move more to the south than east.
The fleet will all start to see a westerly breeze flowing between the low to their south, and the south Atlantic high to their north.
The breeze will reach about 10 knots for the Ericsson 4 as they approach Cape town, and according to the predicted routes in the race viewer’s it will be tricky for the rest of the them. The optimum route now goes via the deep south for everyone except grael and his boys – who should sneak in ahead of the high pressure ridge building between the fleet and the finish.
If Puma and Ericsson 3 hang in the north too long, it could open a passing lane to the south. The + 3 Day Predicted Distance to Leader has Puma and Green Dragon dead even – and that’s assuming that Puma bails out of the north imminently – This is only a forecast, but we can assume that Ken Read will be looking at something similar and getting nervous.
Good luck to all teams!
