The B&G Report - Volvo Ocean Race - Leg 6 Week 3 Review

by Mark Chisnell on 6 May 2015 Top Volvo Ocean Race correspondent, navigator and sailing analyst, Mark Chisnell writes a regular report for B&G on the current race and trends he sees developing. This week he looks back at the third week of Leg 6.

Leg 6 Report 3 – Champagne Sailing

If the first week of Leg 6 was all about strategy – ‘The Tack’, outrunning the cold front and skirting the South Atlantic High – then the second week has been all about boat speed. Relentless, high pressure, pour-it-on-and-don’t-blink boat speed.

The only thing spoiling the champagne sailing has been the seaweed, and there’s been lots of it clogging up rudders, keels, causing wipe-outs and backdowns. But it’s also been a week where attention to detail has paid off enormously. The sailing may have looked simple, but the snakes and ladders were there aplenty.

We left the fleet a week ago as we see them in Pic 1 from 9:40 on the 28th April (all times UTC). The eastern group was doing nicely with Team Brunel in the lead, and Team SCA staking out the furthest position east. They had 40 miles of leverage from Dongfeng Race Team who, along with MAPFRE and Team Alvimedica, were all the way west.

Ahead of them lay a big ridge of high pressure, stretching down from Southern Europe as we can see in Pic 2, which shows the fleet in the same position on the morning of the 28th April, but with the weather forecast for 1st May.

The B&G Deckman’s predicted route showed them skirting the western edge of the high pressure. In doing so, the wind would slowly rotate from south-east to south, and then to the south-west (as you can see from the wind arrows in Pic 2). It meant that they would eventually all need to gybe. This was all going to be about the detail of the timing, and the positioning relative to the rest of the fleet. Let’s see how it played out.

For the rest of this review click here