Rolex Sydney Hobart- Sunday afternoon finish expected for Wild Oats XI

by Richard Gladwell/Sail-World.com/nz on 28 Dec 2014 Wild Oats XI (Oatley family) is expected to cross the finish line, around 3-4pm on Sunday and take her eighth line honours win.

The race leaders are making good time down the coast of Tasmania, and at daybreak Wild Oats XI had approximately 100nm to sail.

According to the weather routing function of Predictwind the leaders will, and are sailing at very fast speeds - with Wild Oats predicted speed of 20kts through the water exceeding that of the tracker showing a speed over the ground of ground of 17kts.

But as the leaders near the finish, winds will soften and at 0900hrs local time will be down to single digits.

The key issue in the finish time being weather Wild Oats XI can sail a direct course to the finish line, or whether she will be forced to gybe repeatedly downwind to chase the optimum wind angle.

Wild Oats XI is predicted to round the last major turning mark just after noon, local time, in winds of just 7.6kts. The breeze stays in single digits for most of the remaining distance to the finish, however by sailing some good angles the supermaxis should be able to maintain fast speeds in excess of the wind speed.

Winds are expected to vary significantly in direction, but are not expected to be headwinds, at the time of the current prognosis. The prognosis will be refined as the leaders close into the coast and move onto a more detailed and refined form of weather data, which should resolve the course iterations which currently exist between Tasman Island and the finish.

We will update as the leaders near Tasman Island - the issue being that Wild Oats XI is coming from further out to sea than the usual approach which is to sail much closer to the Tasmanian coast.

At dawn, Wild Oats enjoyed a 26nm lead over Comanche (Jim and Kristy Clark), with third placed Ragamuffin 100 (Syd Fischer) over 100nm behind the race leader.

Yesterday the narrow hulled and current record holder Wild Oats XI built a lead of 40 nm over the second placed Comanche, as the yachts sailed in lighter winds across Bass Strait

The big improver of Saturday was the Bakewell-White 100, Rio 100 (Manouch Moshayedi) which closed up from seventh on the water to fourth overall, just 1nm behind Team Ragamuffin.

As RIO was sailing a knot faster it was expected that she would pass Ragamuffin, but she dropped back to 5th, and currently is 6nm behind Ragamuffin, according to the leaderboard but again sailing at a much faster speed - indicating that more changes could be coming in the race for third place.

Alive a Reichel Pugh 66, from Tasmania, is currently fourth and makes up the trio expected to contest the third place finish.

At latest reports, Rio had moved through to be third on the leaderboard, but this is only based on distance to sail and is not based on wind and course routing which is the only way to accurately predict race finish times.