Volvo Ocean Race - Groupama 4 prepare for the Saint Helena High

by Franck Cammas on 20 Nov 2011 Volvo Ocean Race sailing team Groupama 4 remain in fourth position on the final phase of leg one, trailing the leaders by 424.80 nm at the 1600 UTC position report.

The Saint Helena High is giving all the crews some degree of grief: her very presence disturbing the usual systems in play, since the boats are being forced to tackle her North face. Indeed, the high pressure of the Atlantic is currently forming a barrier offshore of Cape Town.

The paradox of sailing: Groupama 4 is the fastest across the water, but she's losing the most ground in relation to her rivals! Basically, Franck Cammas and his men are heading virtually due South in easterly tradewinds of around a dozen knots, whilst Telefonica and Puma are diving down to the South-East in a NNE'ly air flow of around ten knots. Camper meanwhile is still in a NE'ly breeze. Within a few hundred miles, the weather situation is completely different and each navigator is doing the best they can to put the wind generated by the high pressure of the Saint Helena High to good use.

However, this system is undergoing a complete transformation: two cells of high pressure fused together on Friday and the phenomenon is taking on a whole new dimension since it will stretch from Brazil to Argentina and from Ghana to South Africa by the end of the weekend. This development of high pressure is providing conditions alternating between moderate breeze and lighter breeze as it waits for the anticyclonic system to retract, thus boosting the tradewind from Sunday evening.

As this phase is taking shape, some windless zones are moving in across the route of the fleet, bringing with them some small cloudy fronts, which are disturbing the usual order of things in the southern Atlantic. The Americans have a sour taste in their mouths from their experience of the system on Friday since they were only about thirty miles further West than the Spanish when Puma became trapped by a zone of light or no air, whilst Telefonica managed to gradually bend her trajectory round towards Cape Town. In the space of 24 hours, Ken Read lost fifty odd miles on Iker Martinez! As such there's not one set route for reaching the finish, as a large amount of micro-phenomena are closing on the fleet, forcing each navigator to adapt to the situation day by day and even hour by hour. For the moment though, the first three have no other choice than to dip down towards the goal to avoid a zone of high pressure which has formed to their West.

For Groupama 4, the 48-hour projection is not the same as this zone of high pressure will implode on itself and reopen a passage for the French boat with established easterly tradewinds of about fifteen knots. Indeed the Saint Helena High will finally stabilise in the middle of the Atlantic, at the latitude of Cape Town. As a result, the wind will strengthen for the leaders but they'll have no other choice than to tackle this high pressure via its North face. The upshot of this is that the final phase of this first leg of the Volvo Ocean Race will most likely see the fleet beating into headwind ... and a light one at that! Not the classic scenario on a round the world then.

In essence, this means that there are lots of upsets in prospect and this first 6,500-mile oceanic course promises to be longer than planned: after two weeks at sea, the leaders aren't even two-thirds of the way there yet and covering the last few miles on a beat isn't going to help. The question is should they start rationing food so as to bridge the gap to Cape Town?

Groupama Sailing Team website