Global Ocean Race- Atlantic match racing championships - Day 4

by Richard Gladwell on 29 Sep 2011
In the last 24 hours the two leaders in the Global Ocean Race have jumped out to a 40nm lead but continue their match race down the Moroccan coast.

After trailing Campagne de France (Halvard Mabire and Miranda Merron), Ross and Campbell Field have been flicking across their stern for the first 12 hours of the fourth day of the Round the World race, before settling for a position on the starboard quarter of the Anglo/French boat.

In taking up a position to the west of campagne de France, Buckley Systems is maybe proving once again the old Whitbread maxim for this part of the ocean which says 'West is Best'. And so it is for the two Fields who have more than matched their rivals for boatspeed for this period.

At the latest sked taken at 0900hrs UTC on 29 September, Campagne de France still led the race by a margin of just two miles with just over 5900nm left to sail to the first of four stopovers in Capetown.

In third place are Cessna Citation (Conrad Colman and Hugo Ramon), who led the fleet on Day 2, but they are almost 40nm behind the race leaders and are six nm ahead of Financial Crisis (Marco Nannini and Paul Peggs). The last two competitors are both moving sharply towards the west, but are 92 and 171nm respectively from the race leaders.

However the steady winds of the past few hours are not expected to continue and some difficult navigational and tactical choices lie ahead of the two race leaders in the next 24 hours.