Drone footage by on-board reporter Martin Keruzore.
As of the end of Leg 6, Dongfeng Race Team is in second place in the 2017/18 Volvo Ocean Race. Leg 7, from Auckland, New Zealand to Italjaí, Brazil, starts Sunday, March 18.
James Blake might have already had his most special moment as part of the Volvo Ocean Race.
The onboard reporter (OBR), who sailed into Auckland with Turn the Tide on Plastic, was greeted by loud cheers before he had even set foot on land.
It was an unexpected, but memorable surprise – his mother, Pippa, and sister, Sarah-Jayne, were out on the water to welcome him home.
“I didn’t realise they’d be out on the water, so I just heard these shouts and screams out there in a tug boat,” Blake said with a grin.
“It was great to see actually, and seeing them on the dock was fantastic. We all hadn’t been together in ages, so that made it special…nothing can beat that. That was fantastic.”
Awwww…
While some parts of the leg would be horrible for the sailors, Blake said he was excited to capture the raw emotion the challenging sea brought out of those onboard.
For him, it was that emotion going from bad to good that he was hoping to shoot when he signed on for the job.
So trying to capture that and show really what it’s like onboard and what the sailors actually go through, a bit more of that human side, that’s what really interests me and actually how tough it is for them.
“They don’t enjoy it all the time. I think they actually find it quite miserable, and it’s trying to capture that and then when they do have their highs they are very good.”
The Volvo Ocean Race celebrated 45 years of women in the race with a landmark event in Auckland on International Women’s Day.
The event, organised by the Magenta Project, and supported by Volvo Ocean Race supplier GAC Pindar, saw iconic females from across the decades take to the stage to reflect on their experiences in Races of the past – and join the conversation on the future, in front of a packed crowd of over 200 attendees.
Three-time Volvo Ocean Race veteran Abby Ehler co-hosted the event, and was joined on stage by a panel consisting of Australian Leah Fanstone (US Challenge/Heineken 1993-94; EF Education 1997-98), Lisa McDonald (EF Education 1997-98; Skipper of Amer Sports Too, 2001-02), Dongfeng’s Carolijn Brouwer and Vestas 11th Hour Racing’s Hannah Diamond. Later, Emirates Team NZ Performance Engineer and University of Auckland graduate Elise Beavis also joined the panel.
French offshore sailor Thomas Rouxel and Olympic winning medalist Nina Curtis will join Team Brunel for Leg 7 from Auckland (NZL) to Itajai (BRA). Rouxel returns to the Volvo Ocean Race after competing for Dongfeng Raceteam in the previous edition. Curtis makes her debut in the race. Next, to them, boat captain Abby Ehler returns after a well-deserved rest in the last Leg.
Crewlist Team Brunel – Leg 7
Bouwe Bekking – NED – skipper Andrew Cape – AUS – navigator Carlo Huisman – NED Kyle Langford – AUS Alberto Bolzan – ITA Thomas Rouxel – FRA Peter Burling – NZL Abby Ehler – GBR Nina Curtis – AUS
Mid-way through the eight-month long Volvo Ocean Race (VOR), seven contesting sailboats continue to scream around the planet, matching gumption and endurance against plucky oceans. This week, leg six of the voyage begins—from Hong Kong to Auckland, New Zealand.
Since around the world sail racing began in the 1960’s and 70’s, the nautical world has dramatically changed. Canvas and polyester sails have been replaced by molded composites; cold molded-plywood hulls and masts made from Kashmiri pine have been replaced by carbon fiber. Barometers to predict the weather have given way to satellite reports, while sextants have been substituted by GPS. Instead of medical advice from a soggy copy of the Ship’s Captain Medical Guide, it can now be live streamed from inland physicians. Breakfasts of canned food, oatmeal or flying-fish scooped off the deck have lost out to freeze dried meals; fresh water, once collected from a bucket lashed under the mast, is now generated by onboard desalination units. Weekly radio position reports are obsolete in an era of satellite updates. Snapshots are long gone as ‘onboard reporters’ control remote cameras and strap on Go-Pros. Gone also are days of packing wine bottles, tequila, guitars, knitting needles and backgammon boards and never being quite sure just where your competitors might be within the roaring seas.
In which I briefly appear! (in the “Dial-a-Fan” segment). Alan and I talked a bunch more about my favorite videos from Leg 3, though that part didn’t make the cut. But they kept the part in which I explain the motivation behind my curation of the Raw Content video spreadsheet, which is the source for the video part of the VOR Raw Content Metadata site.
Bril! I’ll check this out tonight!
So what WERE your favorite videos of Leg 3?
Here’s the list I sent to Alan before the interview:
I felt like the crash-cam footage of the gybe and (especially) the crew trying to get things under control afterward with Nicholson driving and monster waves overtaking them was probably the best reporting of the leg. But those drone shots of them up the rig doing repairs and the pull-back to show them completely alone in the Southern Ocean were artistically the most amazing thing I’ve seen in the race so far.
In which I briefly appear! (in the “Dial-a-Fan” segment). Alan and I talked a bunch more about my favorite videos from Leg 3, though that part didn’t make the cut. But they kept the part in which I explain the motivation behind my curation of the Raw Content video spreadsheet, which is the source for the video part of the VOR Raw Content Metadata site.
Found it on the Volvo site with Google’s reverse image search:
October 17, 2014. Leg 1 onboard Team Vestas Wind. Maciel Cicchetti driving, Tony Rae on mainsheet and Nicolai Sehestead on trim as the boat surfs at 25 knts on the morning of Day
…and then it cuts off, in mid-sentence. 😜
I thought that looked like Nicolai (on AkzoNobel this time). And I wondered about that smooth-ish dome on Maciel (on Brunel this time).
(November 20, 2017; Leg 2, Day 16) – The dance for the Volvo Ocean Race teams around the St Helena High appeared complete, with all seven bows aiming east toward the finish line. Nearly as far south as the Roaring Forties, it was breeze on and heat off with a 1700 nm drag race to home.
And then it got interesting.
Dutch crew Team Brunel opted to go into stealth mode today, cloaking their position from their rivals for up to 24 hours. Trailing only leader MAPFRE by some 35 nm, Brunel made the call to ‘disappear’ from the rankings following the 0700 UTC report.
Will Brunel, the most southerly boat in the fleet, go further south?
Did you see how there’s a bug in the web version of the official tracker such that if you use the slider to back up ever so slightly from the current position you can actually see what appears to be Brunel’s real, unmasked position? I commented on SA via this gif, which felt on-brand if slightly weird.
Dongfeng Race Team Onboard Reporter Jérémie Lecaudey describes how his crewmates differ in their behavior when taking the helm:
It took me a while to understand that Pascal was driving, his body against the stack of sails, one of these stylish positions that some drivers end up having. Stu puts one of his hand upside down, Charles drives like a cowboy on a big truck, Daryl… looks like he’s driving his own car really… he’ll talk to you in 30 + knots and still follow your conversation as if nothing was happening when you’re s*** scared, every wave stopping the boat from gliding perfectly on the ocean unlike tonight, the boat smoothly follows the waves and gain speed up to 20 knots in the gusts.
Daryl’s average when I look at the polar percentage is always around 105, surely one of the best but what the hell, Jeremie, Carolijn, Jackson, they are all the best at it anyway…
Turn the Tide on Plastic gybes to starboard. Volvo Ocean Race, 2017-11-07 1740 UTC. Source.
I want to talk for a second about that guy in red at the back of the boat. That’s Sam Greenfield, the boat’s on-board reporter (OBR). This time around, for the first time, the output of the Volvo OBRs is being published immediately, without filtering by the team sponsor or the race organization. The OBRs shoot the video, edit it on board, uploads it via satellite, and it’s immediately available for viewing on the race’s Raw Content page.
When I saw this video show up in the feed today I immediately got excited. Because in the beginning of the video you can see that the crew is shifting the stack to leeward, which means they’re about to gybe. And as far as I know no one had ever used a drone to record a racing sailboat gybing in conditions like this in the middle of the ocean.
Well, someone has now. :-)
Sam pioneered the use of drones in the last edition of the race, and since then they’ve become common in coverage of sailboat racing. But he keeps pushing the state of the art forward.
The start of Leg 2 has been windy and rough, and a lot of the OBRs (and not only the OBRs) have been dealing with seasickness. Despite being one of the victims, Sam has been sharing amazing stories off the boat over the last two days. I can’t wait to follow him around the world over the next 8 months.
Alan Block (Mr. Clean on Sailing Anarchy) and Matt Knighton (the OBR for Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing, the team that won the previous edition of the Volvo Ocean Race) have a new video podcast all about the media coming off the boats in this edition. I am, as you probably will be unsurprised to learn, very excited about it.
I’ve created a spreadsheet to keep track of the metadata for all the Raw Content videos being uploaded off the boats. See here:
Alan made a nice comment on SA about how helpful the spreadsheet was for his preparation for this episode.
Leg 2 of the race started this morning. This is the first full-on ocean-crossing leg: 7,000 miles, finishing in Cape Town about 3 weeks from now. Great footage from the live show, including helicopter shots of them blasting out into the North Atlantic with 30+ knots of wind. Dongfeng was first out of Lisbon, with MAPFRE right behind them.
Holy crumbs, that is a detailed spreadsheet, hats off to you, @lies…
And this is a great vidcast, especially the bit about NASA being interested in the VOR as an analogue for travel to Mars.
[17 hours into Leg 2, MAPFRE are currently leading. Tracker here.]
