Sail-World set for huge coverage of the 2011-2012 Volvo Ocean Race

by Brendan Maxwell on 27 Sep 2011 The 2011-2012 Volvo Ocean Race starts on 5th November in Alicante Spain. The Sail-World team is planning detailed coverage, running hundreds of stories over the race duration and distributing over four million newsletters to our world-wide audience.

This week we spoke to Sail-World Editor at Large Richard Gladwell who will be heading up our Sail-World coverage of this very important event.

‘At this stage we are going to produce a newsletter a month ahead of the start of the event and then we will produce another newsletter a week out and then one just after the start of the event on the 5th November. Then there will be weekly newsletters while there is racing on and another probably in the middle of each stopover, taking in the port race or a similar major event. Then we will publish again a day or so after the start so and will have the start and first day of racing coverage. We expect to run at least 30 newsletters between now and July 2012 when the race ends.

‘Across a nine month period, we will have a huge amount of content coming from the boats, and we know from previous Volvo Ocean Races run by this group that the quality of it is so high, that we feel really bad about leaving it out of our Sail-World newsletters.

‘Running the dedicated Sail-World Volvo Ocean Race newsletter series allows us to publish the best of all that and so readers are seeing really high quality content.

‘For this event we will be running our own routing and weather stories. We started doing this in the last race using Expedition software with Predictwind providing the weather feed and it gave us some significant insights.

‘Using the combination of PredictWind and Expedition we were able to see a very similar screen to what onboard navigators were seeing. Predictwind has enhanced the routing aspect of their system since the last Volvo Ocean Race.

In the last Volvo Ocean Race, there was an instance on the first leg when we followed Green Dragon, and watched her make a move for the west. There is an old saying in the Whitbread/Volvo for this part of the ocean that 'west is the best' and that is exactly what they did. Green Dragon started off behind and got about 80 miles separation to the west from the rest of the fleet, so they were sailing at a knot faster than the other boats. With the Routing system we could see what was happening. I think Green Dragon lost a couple of hundred miles doing the move initially, but as the wind filled in she really gained. Then we were able to predict the timing to the turning point off Brazil within 30 minutes of it actually happening – from three days out.

‘PredictWind now has a new integrated routing and weather system which we tested on the Auckland to Fiji and the Fastnet race and we are planning to use that to be ahead of the news curve.

‘There is a natural delay on that, getting the information off the boat. The positions come first, then report texts and audios five or six hours later, then maybe 24 hours later you might see the video.

‘As technology moves forward, so does the reporting. The advantage that we have with Sail-World is that because we are a worldwide network operating 24x7, there is always someone on deck monitoring breaking news. So our world-wide audience knows that we are consistently first with the latest news.'

Publisher Rob Kothe commented 'Internet coverage of sailing events is becoming very significant in audience size.

'We are running similarly large Olympic newsletters as well as the Volvo Ocean Race newsletter series and by the mid 2012 we will be delivering feature articles, video both interviews and action, images and news to 250,000 readers each month via 25 different versions of our websites (mobile and geolocated).

'Currently Sail-World.com has 45,000 North American online newsletter subscribers across its racing and cruising sites in the USA and Canada, another 45,000 in the Asia Pacific and 20,000 in UK, Europe and Africa. The UK and Europe are our fastest growing market, as the London Olympics approaches and the Volvo Ocean Race will further grow our sites.

'With that significant audience we have the ability for industry advertisers to chose regional markets, decide their own advertising schedules and change their own advertising content, running multiple ads in each ad space on daily rotation hyperlinked to different web addresses.

'Companies wishing to further expose the Sail-World.com Volvo Ocean Race and Olympic coverage audience to its promotional and commercial news need to contact our media sales representatives, who will be happy to quote on a range of very cost effective media packages,' Kothe added.

For Asian industry groups call Guy Nowell +852 9680 7063 or email asiaeditor(at)sail-world.com for more details

For Australian companies call Phil Arane 0407 076 585 or email Phil(at)trademediaservices.com.au

For New Zealand companies call Colin Preston +6421 267 4842 or email nzsales(at)sail-world.com

For North American companies call Greg Nicoll 877-620-9373 or email gnicoll(at)kerrwil.com

UK and European companies contact Jeraldine Kennedy +44 20 3286 3390 or email jeraldine.kennedy(at)sail-world.com

www.sail-world.com