As I’m writing this (1545 UTC on October 24, 2014), the…
As I’m writing this (1545 UTC on October 24, 2014), the VOR fleet should be in the process of rounding the Fernando de Noronha islands off the coast of Brazil. It will be a while before the tracker on the website updates, but when it does I expect that ADOR and Brunel will have rounded. By the next update at 1840 Vestas probably will as well, and the trailing four boats should round later tonight (their time, which will be this afternoon from my vantage point in California).
Things get kind of interesting then, as you can see from the wind overlay in the excellent fan tracker operated by voldia. A straight shot to Cape Town would be upwind, which is slow, and would take them into a region of high pressure and light winds, which is also slow. The fastest route will probably be to head south along the coast of South America until they reach the vicinity of Uruguay (roughly at the same latitude as Cape Town), then a fast run east to the finish, hopefully helped along by the high winds of a storm system, if they can arrange to catch one of those.
It’s a part of the race where getting the strategy right can make a huge difference, so it’s definitely not over for the boats at the back of the fleet. Also, since the overall result is based on combined finish rankings from all the legs, every position matters. No one’s going to be giving up.
Image credits: From the airplane down to Fernando de Noronha – view from North-East, by Wikimedia user Maggiz, used under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 3.0 Unported license. And Fernando de Noronha, by Flickr user Roberto Garrido. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1tjRNrp.
Tags: vor, volvo ocean race, fernando de noronha.
