There haven’t been any real changes in the VOR standings…
There haven’t been any real changes in the VOR standings for the last day. The official tracker shows SCA and Mapfre having switched places at the back of the fleet, but that’s only because the tracker doesn’t know where the boats are headed. It computes its “distance to lead” (DTL) number by measuring the distance from each boat to the next mark of the course, which in this case is Cape Town. But the boats aren’t going straight to Cape Town; they’re heading south to pick up the westerlies first.
The tracker also showed the DTL numbers tightening considerably as the boats rounded Fernando, but again, that was an anomaly of how it computes the distances. Basically, those DTL numbers are going to be pretty meaningless until the boats have turned for the final run to Cape Town.
A small low pressure region is creating some interesting wind off Rio, about 400 miles south of the lead boats. They should be reaching that area about 24 hours from now. At least according to the weather model being displayed in my iPad’s WeatherMap+ app, at that point winds will still be varying from very light to quite strong across a relatively small area. There’s an opportunity for boats that get it right to squirt through quickly, while boats that get it wrong risk being left behind.
Then it will be all about cutting the corner and getting into the westerlies, which also is looking kind of tricky. I think that at least within the two clumps of boats (the lead three, and then the following four) there’s a good chance of some reshuffling over the next several days.
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Tags: vor, volvo ocean race.
