The Leg 1 finish is coming down to the wire.

ADOR is holding onto a slim lead (6.7 miles as of the 0340 UTC update). Dongfeng was south of them, then crossed their wake and are now north of them. It’s hard to be sure, but it seems possible that the two lead boats are currently tracking each other on the AIS; that has about a 6-mile radius. Or it could be that the other boat’s position is unknown them outside of the regular scheds at 0715, 1115, 1915, and 2315.

As the trough that’s been pushing them has moved past, the wind has backed counter-clockwise and is now blowing from the south. In the two bottom images above I’ve run the wind model forward 12 hours (for the left image) and 24 hours (for the right image), along with a line showing roughly how far the lead boats might have traveled during that time. If the model is accurate (a big if), it looks like the lead four boats will be able to reach Cape Town about 24 hours from now, with the wind gradually lightening, and a belt of calm forming a barrier to any of the trailing three boats being able to threaten them.

Or it could be that the light winds overtake the leaders, and it ends up being a drifting race to the finish.

ADOR will probably try to match race with Dongfeng, staying between them and the finish. But Brunel, 33 miles back, is close enough to threaten a late pass if the two leaders get too involved with each other, especially if the wind dies and lengthens the race.

Meanwhile, at the back of the fleet, SCA has been catching up rapidly with Mapfre, which has fallen into the light winds you can see in the first image above. Alvimedica, currently in fourth, also appears to be at risk of being swallowed up by that same patch of dark blue. With a little luck SCA might miss the worst of the hole by staying north, and pass one or even both of the boats ahead of them before the finish.

The overall race results are determined by low-point scoring from each leg (one point for first, two for second, and so on), so every position matters. In their latest updates the women on SCA sound seriously fired up. I’d love to see them end the leg on a high note.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1DXXYkY.

Tags: vor, volvo ocean race.

This entry was posted by jbc on Monday, November 3rd, 2014 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Tumblr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.