This video from SCA is almost two days old now; I’m a little behind in my VOR obsession. But I really liked it. It shows the focus they currently have on staying with the other boats and keeping their speed up.

So far they’ve done a pretty good job of that. As the fleet left Abu Dhabi they quickly fell back to sixth place, and have been struggling to keep in touch with the back edge of the fleet since then. But they’ve mostly succeeded.

The reality is that they’re just not as fast as the other boats. They eventually can get up to speed when they have competitors close to them to serve as a measuring stick, but when conditions change (and on a racing sailboat conditions are almost always changing) they tend to get out of sync and fall off the pace. At least when they’re close to another boat (within visual range during the day, or within the 6-mile range of the AIS transponders at night) they can get immediate feedback that they’re slow. Once they lose touch with the fleet, though, they’ll be on their own, with only the once-every-six-hours scheds to give them limited feedback.

For the last few days they’ve been sticking with MAPFRE, who also seem to have issues with boatspeed. At least together they’re faster than they would be individually.

Anyway, they’re learning, and getting faster. They’ve spoken in a previous video that their plan for this leg is to hang with the fleet until they reach the Straits of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, where they hope that the inshore racing will give them a chance to reproduce their success in the last few in-port races.

I think it’s a good plan. I look forward to seeing how well they can execute it.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1tLJ11b.

Tags: vor, volvo ocean race, weareteamsca.

This entry was posted by jbc on Wednesday, January 7th, 2015 at 5:56 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.