Brian Carlin will probably win the 1,000-Euro prize they give to…
Brian Carlin will probably win the 1,000-Euro prize they give to the best OBR for each leg (again, after winning already for Leg 1), because of the amazing work he did documenting the grounding and subsequent salvage operation on Vestas Wind. And he deserves it; that footage is amazing.
But under any other circumstances, it would be a crime if it didn’t go to Yann Riou on Dongfeng. His videos are beautiful mini-documentaries of life aboard. This one, uploaded today, focuses on the events of last night (Friday, December 5 – Saturday, December 6), in the course of which it sounds like the crew was in all-hands-on-deck mode pretty much all night, making numerous sail changes in a series of squalls and intervening light winds.
By the end of the night their hard work (and some luck) had paid off, and Dongfeng was leading nearby rival Brunel. And since ADOR’s Azzam, to the west, had a trickier time exiting the doldrums, Dongfeng now has the overall lead as they head into the strengthening northeasterlies of the Arabian Sea.
I love the video not just because it captures that pivotal moment. It’s that it does such a good job of showing what it’s like racing at night in changeable conditions.
Growing up sailing in Southern California, the offshore races were almost always decided at night. That’s when the wind would die and get really shifty, and the experienced crews knew to push hard, fighting through the disorientation and fatigue, while the less-experienced crews inevitably eased up and fell behind. And for all the reasons that it’s hard to race a boat in those conditions, it must be just as hard, or harder, to make a video that conveys what that’s like.
Yann did that here.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1rZmuT9.
Tags: vor, volvo ocean race, dongfeng race team, yann riou, i am a yann riou fanboy, it's kind of out of control at the moment, apologies for that.
