As of noon today UTC (October 28), the teams are gradually…
As of noon today UTC (October 28), the teams are gradually sailing into the lighter winds on the northern edge of the high. Brunel is nominally in the lead per the tracker, but that’s because they’re closer to Cape Town. In terms of who’s closer to the good wind I think it’s a tossup between them and ADOR, 60 miles west-southwest of them.
Then there’s a gap of about 70 miles to Alvimedica (who’ve done a great job moving up from the back of the fleet in the last few days), Dongfeng, and Vestas (well to the west). And then a gap of 150 miles to Mapfre.
And poor SCA. They had a terrible time since midnight. When I saw how much distance they’d lost I wondered if they’d had some kind of mechanical failure. But no, checking the tracker it shows that they just sailed into a hole.
At midnight UTC their nearest competitor, Mapfre, was 23.5 miles south of them. But then their windspeed and boatspeed fell to under 10 knots and stayed there for hours while Mapfre kept going. By 1000 UTC Mapfre was 77.1 miles south of them.
SCA is moving again now. But that 0715 sched must have been awful. It’s one thing to struggle in light winds all night when you hope the other boats around you are experiencing the same or worse. But to learn that no, it was just you, is discouraging.
The silver lining about their being so far behind is that they have a chance to see which of the leaders do best crossing the high and use that to their advantage. But it’s small consolation.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1vaLh1K.
Tags: vor, volvo ocean race, weareteamsca.
