anonsally replied to your photoset “Vestas exits the Med As of October 24, 2017, Vestas 11th Hour Racing…”

ooh! has it started?

It has! They started Sunday in Alicante, Spain, exited from the Mediterranean Monday afternoon/evening, and are now en route to the turning mark just northeast of the island of Madeira, about 700 miles southwest of the Straits of Gibraltar. If all continues according to the plan they’ll finish Leg 1 in Lisbon, Portugal next weekend.

It has been quite exciting so far, and the coverage has been really good. They are posting video from the boats on the official site’s Raw content page, which is something I’ve been particularly whiny about wanting them to do in the past, so good on them.

Pre-race favorites MAPFRE have clawed their way from toward the back up into second place. But the surprise leaders so far have been Vestas 11th Hour, the team led by Charlie Enright and Mark Towill, the two young(ish) Americans who led the Alvimedica team last time. Their main sponsor is Vestas Wind, who sponsored a different group of sailors in the last race. They (Charlie and Mark) have picked up some top sailors for their crew, including Simon Fisher, who was navigator on Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing (the overall winner) last time.

Wind has been easterly, meaning they had a quick run out through the Strait of Gibraltar. The wind funneled through there enough to give them gusts of 30 knots yesterday afternoon, which is when those helicopter shots of Vestas were taken. Besides some really good navigation from SiFi, they’ve been sailing aggressively, using a larger sail (the Masthead Code 0) when Akzonobel behind them changed down to a more-conservative Fractional Code 0 to get through the Strait.

Now (Tuesday night) the wind has pretty much died. MAPFRE has positioned themselves well to the north of the rest of the fleet; it will be interesting to see if they can get the new wind first.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/2gHlkwC.

Tags: anonsally, vor, volvo ocean race.

This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, October 24th, 2017 at 12:12 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.