Volvo Ocean Race - Team SCA off to gutsy leg 2 start
by Victoria Low on 20 Nov 2014
Cape Town, South Africa, November 19 - Volvo Ocean Race Leg 2 from Cape Town to Abu Dhabi. Team SCA leads out of Cape Town.
Rick Tomlinson / Team SCA
An invigorated, rested and relatively relaxed crew on Team SCA led the Volvo Ocean Race fleet from Cape Town late this afternoon at the start Leg Two of the Volvo Ocean Race to Abu Dhabi.
The 6,125-mile leg will provide a large variety of conditions and will require good seamanship and good navigational choices.
'It is pretty windy so it should be an exciting start. We will first head south and then try to work out at what point to turn left, avoid the cyclones, pick our way through the Doldrums and then drift along in the sea breeze at the end,' commented Team SCA navigator Libby Greenhalgh before dock out. 'It feels like there is a fair amount of pressure [from a navigational perspective] and with no one having done this leg before, and it is a big leg, that makes it pretty open for us, which gives us a pretty good chance.'
For the first all-female team in the Volvo Ocean Race for 12 years, the key to success on this leg is to keep pushing. 'We need to use all the lessons that we learnt on the first in the right way. This leg will be fast to begin with and will probably be frustratingly slow at the end. But we need to get back into our normal onboard routines as quickly as possible and sail the boat well, in the way that we have been taught,' commented Sam Davies, Team SCA’s skipper.
'We will have Southern Ocean, Doldrums, pirates, Persian Gulf – we have a big month ahead of us, and we are ready,' concluded Davies.
