It’s neck and neck, but ADOR’s neck keeps being just a little farther forward than Dongfeng’s. The lead as of the 0640 UTC update is 3.3 miles, with just over 90 miles to go to Cape Town. Winds have dropped; in the latest update the two leaders were reporting 7-8 knots of wind from the southeast and 11-12 knots of boatspeed. If they maintain their current speed they should finish around 1420 UTC on Wednesday, November 5, or about 0620 California time.

I don’t know the details of navigating the last little bit into Cape Town, but I’ve heard that it’s tricky, and especially with the wind lightening I don’t think anyone on either boat is going to be relaxing. The black line in the last image above shows the actual finish line, which stretches between the Cape Town Port Tower on shore and Government Mark number 8 out beyond the breakwater.

Toward the end of Tuesday’s “Inside Track” episode Genny Tulloch said:

The leaders are now only 250 miles from Cape Town, so we’re hoping to see them enter the finish sometime after midday tomorrow. We’ll be going live here from the race headquarters about three hours before the estimated finish time. We’ll have live calls to the boats, a live tracker, and updates from race control. But of course that finish time is a moving target right now. So as we get closer tomorrow, stay updated on our Twitter feeds and our live tracker.

I’m not sure what to expect from the VOR media operation, but I plan to climb out of my (warm, dry, stationary) bed in the morning to see what I can of the finish. I’m not really pulling either way; I think it would be exciting for Dongfeng to win, but I also think if ADOR can manage to hold them off it will be a richly deserved victory.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/10tK3qe.

Tags: vor, volvo ocean race.

This entry was posted by jbc on Wednesday, November 5th, 2014 at 12:08 am 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.