Dongfeng arrives in Sanya at sunrise on January 27, 2015, taking first place in Leg 3 and capturing the overall lead in the 38,000-mile Volvo Ocean Race.
The Sanya in-port race is on Saturday, February 7. Leg 8, from Sanya to Auckland, departs the following day.
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Almost there
If nothing breaks Dongfeng is going to win Leg 3, finishing around midnight UTC tonight and taking sole possession of the overall lead in the race. So proud of those guys.
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Into the funnel
The VOR fleet is squeezing down into the Malacca Strait. If you look at the wind image on the lower left, you can see the problem that front-runner Dongfeng faces: The farther into the funnel they go, the lighter the wind becomes, until they’re basically in drifting conditions. They’re also dealing with strong tidal currents, which in a worst-case scenario can mean it’s actually in their interest to anchor (assuming the water is shallow enough to allow it). I don’t expect any of the crews are going to get much sleep for the next day or two.
It looks like Dongfeng’s track took them into a finger of lighter wind today, while the rest of the fleet stayed south, closer to Sumatra, and made up a lot of ground. At noon UTC the Chinese boat had an 85-mile lead; by 2300 that was down to 25 miles, with Mapfre, ADOR, and Alvimedica close together and Brunel only a few miles behind. Fortunately for Dongfeng they started moving again in the last hour, while the boats behind seem to have slowed.
Farther astern, SCA appears to be making a play for more wind (or better current?) by heading south toward the Sumatran coast. At first it didn’t seem to be working, but from the wind diagram it looks like it has a chance, and in the last hour they’ve started moving well.
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My favorite video from the last few days.
I’ve complained before about the added music. I get tired of the attempt to inject artificial drama. But this time it works. I think it probably would have worked just as well without the music, at least for me, but at least it didn’t get in the way.
Dongfeng is into the Malacca Strait, and still has a sizable lead. Anything can happen now; they’re in the zone of wind shadows, fishing nets, floating debris, and fast-moving shipping, and dealing with those obstacles is only going to get worse as they head through the funnel into the final squeeze past Singapore and into the South China Sea.
A lot could still happen. But if they can keep sailing the way they have been, Dongfeng has this. So proud of what they’ve done on this leg.
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Navigator Pascal Bidégorry of Dongfeng Race Team. As of January 9, 2015, Dongfeng is leading the 38,000-mile Volvo Ocean Race, sailing south through the Arabian Sea en route to Sanya, China. Source.
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I’d been a little anxious that Yann Riou no longer being the OBR on Dongfeng would mean a reduction in the quality of the videos coming off the boat; as anyone who follows me knows I’ve become a serious Yann Riou fanboy. But at least judging from this first video uploaded by replacement OBR Sam Greenfield, I don’t need to worry.
He’s doing something I haven’t seen in an on-board video before: Using a light-sensitive camera to shoot in color under the light of the full moon. It works better than I would have expected.
He also managed to capture the moment when the boat hit a fishing net, including reactions from Kevin and Charles. He cut it in with an interview on the bow with Kevin talking about his family members who are fishermen in Saint-Malo. It all works really well.
He also included a beautiful shot of Orion.
A+ would recommend. :-)
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I love how Yann moves the camera, how he puts the viewer in the middle of the action.
Best. OBR. Ever.
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Argh. The only way to track this in real time at the moment is by following the @VO65_DONGFENG (Yann) and @DongfengRacing (shore team) Twitter feeds. Which, if you know about my love-hate relationship with Twitter, is doubly frustrating.
Anyway, it looks like Brunel has passed Dongfeng to retake the lead. But the wind near the finish is light, so who knows? Hopefully the livestream will come online shortly.
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They’re basically overlapping icons in the 0340 UTC tracker update. Make it live, VOR central! The suspense is killing me!
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Sunrise in the Persian Gulf. Dongfeng and Brunel (with ADOR just behind) have been match racing all night. Every time Brunel gybes, Dongfeng gybes to stay between them and the finish.
Still nothing live on the VOR YouTube livestream, but hopefully we’ll get something within the next couple of hours.
Go Dongfeng!
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Dongfeng leading
The video above is the latest on-board footage, showing Dongfeng tacking through the islands on the southern side of the Strait of Hormuz. When the video was taken they were still trailing Brunel, but in the ensuing hours Dongfeng picked up some better wind, and Brunel had some sort of a run-in with a fishing net (or something?) that cost them some time. So as of the 1840 UTC tracker update Dongfeng had a 1.4 mile lead:
Winds between their current location and the finish line, 150 miles southwest at Abu Dhabi, look like light northeasterlies. So there’s still plenty of racecourse for any of the three leading boats to get in front. It should be a long gybing match through the night, with the finish sometime Saturday morning Abu Dhabi time (UTC+4).
VOR central at first said they’d be streaming the finish live starting around 0500 UTC Saturday, which would be 2100 (9 p.m.) tonight in California. But they have a live video feed running now with a countdown clock that looks like it goes boom at 0100 UTC / 1700 Pacific. So maybe the livestream will be the live version of the tracker with the endless music loop, and then Genny will appear to start doing the live stuff four hours later?
Not sure. Looking forward to seeing what happens. Go Dongfeng!
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The wind filled in from the Iranian (northeastern) shore, which meant ADOR couldn’t complete the pass it looked like they were making 12 hours ago. It’s still Brunel in the lead, but Dongfeng has crept up really close — only 1.2 miles back in the 0340 update.
The Gulf of Oman is 4 hours later than UTC, so it’s Friday morning for the racers. They have about 5 knots of wind from the north, and are slowly beating their way toward the Straits of Hormuz, where they’ll make the final turn for Abu Dhabi.
I’ve loved watching Horace (Jin Hao Chen), the 22-year-old trainee bow man on Dongfeng, come into his own. On Leg 1 he was quiet, focused on his job, letting teammate Wolf do the talking for them. He still has that intensity, but he’s opened up some, and in the last few videos he’s shown more of his personality than I’d seen before.
He’s really into the race, into passing Brunel and winning the leg. I mean, of course they’re all really into it, just as the sailors on Brunel are equally into denying them that. But Horace is really into it.
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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.
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My man-crush Yann Riou on Dongfeng, always in position for the great shot: This one of Brunel, crossing behind them around 0601 UTC today (November 29), as both boats were negotiating the eye of the tropical depression.
The depression turned out to be weaker than it might have been; there was a decent swell and 30+ knots of wind, but not the storm conditions I’d been guilty of hyping. Each boat in the fleet sailed in toward the center of it on starboard, then gybed and headed out on port.
The fleet stretched out in the process, which was good for the leaders but really bad for the three trailers (Vestas, Alvimedica, and SCA), though Campbell Field, who’s been blogging about the navigation and routing, thinks SCA will be pulled back close before the end due to the fleet compressing as it hits lighter wind to the north.
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I’ve become a huge fan of Dongfeng on-board reporter Yann Riou. At 40 he’s by far the oldest OBR in the fleet; Brunel’s Stefan Coppers is 32, while the rest are 30 or younger.
Partly I think it’s my fantasy of sailing on the boats myself, and my recognition that at 52 I can’t credibly picture myself working the foredeck (which I did in my competitive sailing days) or navigating (which I also did, and for which being 52 actually wouldn’t be a disqualification, except I lack the extensive experience in long-distance offshore navigation that I’d need). And since I’ve spent most of my professional life doing media/Webbish-related things, my subconscious tends to slot me in as OBR.
So Yann is the closest thing to a “me” viewpoint character in the race, and I probably like him more than I otherwise would because of that.
But mostly I like him because he’s awesome. At least for me, his videos are consistently the most interesting and engaging.
He has a point of view that he gets across, but as a director he’s mostly invisible. Other OBRs are more obviously present in their video segments. Corinna on SCA feels tentative. Her viewpoint is frequently anchored in the hatchway. it feels like the point of view of a novice trying to stay out of the way. Brian on Vestas makes himself the star, pushing the Irish wit and charm in a way that is fun, certainly, but which doesn’t work as well for me as Yann’s serious, self-effacing documentary work.
More than any other OBR, Yann is out there in the action. He puts the camera in the right spot, getting close to the sailors as they’re doing their jobs. For their part they seem used to it; they just ignore him and go on with what they’re doing. Which works great for someone like me who cares more about what’s actually happening than about jokey things like how much the OBR’s boots smell.
It’s not all action shots, though. Yann also does a wonderful job capturing the human stories on the boat, as he does in this video about Dongfeng’s newest, youngest crewmember, Black (Liu Xue).
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Heh. More cool gybing action from Dongfeng in today’s batch of videos.
It’s interesting to compare this to the Leg 1 gybe I posted yesterday. The wind is lighter, but the ocean is rougher. There’s a big leftover swell coming from behind, along with a wicked cross sea. Welcome to the Southern Ocean. Despite the potentially frustrating circumstances, though, the gybe is impressively smooth and quiet.
Compare it to the gybe starting at about 2:35 in this video from Mapfre. Similar conditions, similar result. But there’s a just a touch less smoothness, a touch more chatter. Mapfre feels like a boat being sailed by a bunch of really talented individuals. Dongfeng feels like a boat being sailed by a team.
The main attraction for me in watching these videos is indulging the Walter Mitty fantasy of actually being on board. The fantasy feels different for each boat, because each crew is different. So I wonder: If I had my choice, who would I sail with?
I can’t sail on SCA because I’m chromosomally disqualified, but if I could I’d probably pick them. So maybe ADOR, because those guys are just amazing. I’m totally envious of Matt Knighton’s ringside seat to the awesomeness.
But honestly: these guys. It’s just seems like such a cool vibe on their boat.
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In the intro to “Helter Skelter” on Rattle and Hum, Bono says, “This is a song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles. We’re stealing it back.”
I’m stealing back the phrase “Chinese gybe.” From now on I’m only using it to describe a gybe performed quietly, precisely, and with a certain air of Sino-Gallic élan.
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Gybing Dongfeng – Source
On October 30 Dongfeng’s OBR, Yann Riou, uploaded one of my favorite videos from Leg 1. Mostly it’s about language, the difficulty of communicating on a boat where the only shared language is English and no one speaks it natively.
Toward the end of the video is this 16-second shot of them gybing. I loved it when I first saw it, and when I used the tracker to try to figure out when it took place I loved it even more.
The video was shot on the afternoon of October 27, around 15:20 UTC, when Dongfeng was 350 miles off the coast of Brazil. How can I be sure? Because in the six days between leaving the doldrums and entering the Saint Helena high, Dongfeng only gybed twice: This gybe, from port to starboard, and again two hours later, from starboard back to port.
Which means this quiet ballet, broken only by the call of “gybing” from the helm as the gennaker comes through and a curt “go” from one of the grinders, was necessarily a one-take kind of thing.
I’ve always been a sucker for a nice tracking shot.
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Red sky at night
The sunset as the teams left Cape Town was beautiful.
Yann Riou on Dongfeng got footage of someone (maybe Kevin Escoffier?) working the bow, with Mapfre ahead of them. Corinna Halloran on SCA videoed Annie Lush (I think?) grinding with Alvimedica to leeward.
I’m happy to have the on-board videos again. I wish all the teams were as good as Dongfeng and SCA about posting them quickly with minimal post-OBR editing.
As the sun set SCA was leading, though just barely. Then they and Mapfre tacked inshore a little early, sailed into lighter wind, and had to tack out again, causing them to fall behind the other five boats. Around 2315 UTC Vestas also got burned from being too far inshore and had to tack out.
At sunrise SCA was at the back of the fleet with Vestas a mile and half to starboard and Mapfre three miles ahead. Throughout the day today, SCA has seemed a bit off the pace, though it’s hard to tell why from the tracker. Lighter wind? Steering/trimming? Sail selection? Weed on the keel? As of the 1540 update, SCA and Vestas are trailing the fleet, about 12 miles behind current leader Alvimedica.
Winds were lighter than expected this morning (Stacey Jackson talks about that in the SCA video), but were back up to the mid-20s in the latest update. The boats have finished beating, and now are reaching southeast toward stronger wind. Tonight they’ll cross the Agulhas Current, which tends to build up nasty waves as it flows counter to the wind. Hopefully everything on the boats holds together.
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Dongfeng Race Team prepares for Leg 2:
After 25 days at sea in leg one of the Volvo Ocean Race, the crew of the Dongfeng Race Team are now preparing for the challenge of leg two from Cape Town to Abu Dhabi. This is another exceptionally tough oceanic marathon and although slightly shorter than leg one at 6,125 nautical miles, it is still the third longest leg of the race.
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