Volvo Ocean Race – 40-45 Knots at the End of the World?
by Rob Kothe & Jedda Murphy on 5 Jun 2015
Abu Dhabi's Azzam piercing the North Atlantic Ocean on the leg 7 from Newport, USA to Lisbon, Portugal - Volvo Ocean Race 2014-15 Ian Roman / Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing
The pointy end of the 2014-2015 Volvo Ocean race is here, there are five boats that could win this race, certainly that will need some bad results from the current leader Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing, but with the fleet now back to seven boats and Team SCA likely to do better in the short ocean sprints anything could happen.
The upcoming Lisbon to Lorient leg is set to provide some serious upwind sailing with 40-45 knots forecast for Cape Finnistere, which in Roman time was considered to be the End of the known World, so boat breakages could easily cause a leader board reshuffle.
After six months out of the race, the rebuilt Team Vestas Wind showed in Thursday's practice race Chris Nicholson and his blue boat experienced crew will be on the pace on Legs 8 and 9.
This team is strong, fresh, the sails are sadly hardly used and the boat is pretty much new so Team Vestas Wind could with easily take podium places, adding to the possible pain for the overall race leaders. Nico knows the blue boats chances have improved with the strong upwind forecast, the boats are likely to stay close together across the Bay of Biscay.
Some ‘needle’ has been emerging between the crews centering on the matters going to the Jury, with Ian Walker’s frustration with Dongfeng cutting the corner thru a traffic separation zone out of Newport come up hard and strong in reports from the boat and again after a question from Sail-World at the skippers press conference today. As MAPFRE skipper Iker Martinez just said in a Sail-World interview any rule that sees four out of six boats potentially before the Jury it probably means the rule needs simplifying.
Interesting thing is that in the America’s Cup world, Martinez’s comments questioning Jury decisions in this Sail-World interview below, would attract a Rule 63 slap down, whereas the culture within the Volvo Ocean Race scene, is totally different.
Volvo Ocean Race CEO Knut Frostad, listens carefully and improvements flow for the benefit of the race, the sailors and the wider sailing scene. While some events seem to be spirally downwards and it will not surprise if there are nine VOR-65’s on the 2017 start-line in Alicante.
Sail-World has interviewed all the skippers and by the end of today, all these interviews will be live.
While our focus has been on this key VOR stopover there is lots of news from the local scene in this newsletter, we trust you will find it interesting.
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