The B&G Report - Volvo Ocean Race - Leg 7 Week 1 Review

by Mark Chisnell on 24 May 2015 Top Volvo Ocean Race correspondent, navigator and sailing analyst, Mark Chisnell writes a regular report for B&G on the current race and trends he sees developing. This week he previews Leg 7 Week 1.

Mark Chisnell – Leg 7 Report 1 – Not Your Regular Trans-Atlantic

Leg 7 from Newport, Rhode Island to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal is just 2,800 miles and is expected to take the Volvo Ocean Race fleet about eight or nine days. So two days into the leg, it’s already 25% over – blink and you’ll miss this one.

Fabulous Send-Off

It looked like Newport gave the teams a send-off to remember, but it didn’t take long for the weather to disrupt the cheery mood as the pleasant 15-knot south-westerly faded – but that was always going to happen, and no one should have been surprised.

A big low pressure system was sitting out in the Atlantic, east of Newport, and the anti-clockwise circulation was driving a solid north-easterly down from Nova Scotia to the eastern seaboard. Once the fleet broke into this wind it would be a fast ride east. There were a few hurdles in the way before they could reach it though, not least of which was the fact that the wind was going to have to shift through 180 degrees in the first 24 hours.

The tactical situation became even more awkward when the wind chose to take the first step in this transition by lightening just as the teams were going around the Rhode Island Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS). This is an area where the authorities separate incoming and outgoing ships into different lanes – much like a highway – for safety reasons. The Race Officials made it an exclusion zone, and that seems to have caused some controversy…

Mood Change

Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing Onboard Reporter (OBR) Matt Knighton wrote: “We had gybed several times to get around the GPS coordinates which marked the corner of the zone… Before the leg, race management decided that teams needed to either respect the correct flow of traffic in the lanes or not enter the zone at all. Dongfeng, MAPFRE, and Team SCA entered the zone.

“We watched as their courses on the nav computer sailed deeper and deeper into the red coloured box against the traffic flow. Their routes didn’t just cut the corner on a piece of open water with little significance – no, they were the equivalent of riding a bike across an eight-lane highway and then turning left into oncoming traffic… Will there be a penalty? We don’t know. All we can do now is chase them down as Lisbon grows nearer on the horizon.”

For the rest of this review click here