Pam

The Auckland in-port race is scheduled for Saturday (Friday in California), with the leg 5 start on Sunday. But tropical cyclone Pam may have other ideas.

The wind forecast above is for 1200 UTC on Sunday, or about 13 hours after midday in Auckland, when the Volvo fleet would be expected to be heading out into the Pacific. But if that means they’d be trying to sail into the 80-knot headwinds and monster waves of a Category 2 cyclone, race control almost certainly would decide to keep them home for a day or so to let the worst of it pass by.

That’s still a few days away, and Pam could speed up, slow down, or change direction in the meantime. At the moment it’s passing through the area that the Volvo fleet sailed through during leg 4, making life miserable for Vanuatu and surrounding islands. It currently is a Category 4 cyclone with sustained winds of 117 knots; it is expected to intensify into a Category 5 “super cyclone” with winds in excess of 135 knots by 0200 UTC Friday. According to one model it might reach a central pressure of less than 880 mb, making it one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded.

I’ve sailed in winds of 40+ knots a couple of times, and been on a boat in protected waters when gusts were hitting 60 a few other times. I literally can’t imagine what it would be like to be caught at sea in a Category 5 storm. My heart goes out to the people on those islands.

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

Tags: vor, volvo ocean race, cyclone pam, vanuatu.

This entry was posted by jbc on Wednesday, March 11th, 2015 at 3:37 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.