Sal’s Ocean Globe Race Analysis: It is getting serious for the 12 yachts now participating in the Ocean Globe Race second leg, from Cape Town to Auckland....
It is getting serious for the 12 yachts now participating in the Ocean Globe Race second leg, from Cape Town to Auckland.
As they have dipped South, the weather has taken on a distinctly inhospitable feel. There have been some difficult sail changes which can be exhausting and hard to cope with, as they tend to happen suddenly.
There is none of the nice warm up, ready for exercise in the gym stuff. Your muscles are cold, you might have had to just turn up from your bunk to help but, regardless, if a sail change has to happen, the Southern Ocean isn’t interested in how you are feeling.
The lead pack of 4 are clearly working well as they are achieving very good 24 hr runs. Everyone is trucking along in a North Westerly on top of clockwise spinning low sitting far to the South West of the Kerguelen Islands, which are a mark on the course to be left to starboard.
The latest update shows a bit of a split in the pack of 4 with Maiden and Helsinki sailing higher angles to the north and Pen Duick VI and Translated9 sailing deeper to the south. They are sharing weather information as there are so few Weatherfax stations now because vessels use computer generated models, so, it puts the boats in this race at a disadvantage to the boats in the 70s and 80s.
Luckily the navigators have taken it upon themselves to make the best of it and keep everyone as well informed as they can be by sharing information, which, considering the advantage a boat could gain by keeping it to themselves, shows very admirable qualities in the fleet. Maiden and Pen Duick 6 seem to have turned into the “go to” for reliable weather information.
It is up to the navigators on each boat to interpret the information given and try to forecast what is to come.
It will play out over the next days who is making the best educated guesses!
- Sal
