Volvo Ocean Race- The bunching of the fleet - should we stop the boat?

by Richard Gladwell, Sail-World.com on 8 Mar 2015 With four Legs sailed and four different winners, the 2014-2015 Volvo Ocean Race is not a Round the World Race of yesteryear.

In the new Volvo Ocean Race, no boat has won more than one In Port race, further underlining the evenness of the one design Volvo 65.

The margins are contracting too, with the now-six boat fleet finishing inside six hours at the end of Leg 4 - 5200nm of intense racing.

At the skippers media conference following Leg 4, two factors were identified – the one design and AIS (Automatic Identification System).

'I think the one design makes a big difference', says Bouwe Bekking, skipper of Team Brunel and now on his seventh Volvo Ocean race and its predecessor. 'In the past, the guys with the fastest boats did very well, but I think AIS has a big impact because everyone is just looking at it. On the last leg, everyone was just watching AIS waiting for someone to move and take the northern course option, and in the end we left it too late.'

‘Sometimes you are making decisions just based on looking at the AIS. It is good for the spectators because everyone stays together, and we have close racing because it is scary to break away, and that is why the racing is so close.'

The Automatic Identification System is in use as a ship/vessel avoidance system. It transmits a vessel identifier, course and speed, plus other navigational data every 2-10 seconds usually to a satellite network, but occasionally to a shore station.

AIS has been progressively adopted by maritime safety organisations and regulators over the past decade or so. Its purpose is to avoid collisions and positions of vessels within a range of 10 nm. Data is received and re-transmitted back to vessels within vicinity. Regulators have made its use compulsory in their jurisdictions, and it is now turned on for the whole race.

'In previous races (where custom design boats were raced), some teams had already lost before the racing had started,' says Abu Dhabi Skipper Ian Walker, now on his third Volvo Ocean Race. 'Previously some teams had given themselves a very good chance of winning through their preparation and design. But now that is not the case. Everyone has a chance of winning. If you sail well you are going to win, and if you don’t sail well you are going to lose. That is great, and that is what we are enjoying.'

The feedback from elsewhere in the Volvo Ocean Race sailors is that without the move to one-design there would not have been a 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race.

But on the vexed issue of AIS the British double Olympic Silver medalist is more sanguine.

'To give you an idea of the impact of AIS, when we were in third position about three days ago, we talked about slowing down, so we could get out of AIS range, so we could actually do something that would not be seen by the other competitors. That is a bit weird.

'As long as you are within 10nm of someone, they can see where you are and where you are heading. If you are all in the same one-design boats, and you all have strong teams and you’re six miles behind, and they can see what you are doing, then it is going to be pretty hard to get around them.

'If you are 12 miles behind (and out of AIS range) then you can quickly get 50nm of separation. In many ways, that is what Mapfre did well in the last few days, as they got far enough away from Dongfeng to be able to do their own thing, and we didn’t know where they were.

'AIS is having a big impact,’ Walker added.

The question was put to Walker that the closeness of the racing in the trans-oceanic legs was such that it seemed that that the function of the legs was really just to determine the starting grid positions for the final sprint to the finish on the last day.

'We also talked about just putting the boats in the water at the Bay of Islands, and not done the first 5,000 miles!'

'In fact we were further behind the leaders at the end of the inshore loop at the start in Sanya, than we were at the finish – that is a bit mind blowing', Walker quipped, chuckling at the irony of the statistic.

'It is a little weird. I spent 24 hours just looking at a computer screen hoping a margin of 0.8nm would turn to 0.9nm and not 0.7nm. It is intense,' Walker added.

'You can see the other boats all the time on AIS, when you are close,' says Team Alvimedica’s Dave Swete. 'The next challenge is to overtake the boat ahead. Even though it is close out there, it is hard to overtake a boat that is ahead, because they can match your move. It is easier to defend you lead once you are in front.'

'In the older versions of the Volvo and Whitbread Races, you’d use a hand bearing compass and maybe a radar to get the range and bearing of a competitor,' says Team Alvimedica watch captain, Ryan Houston. 'But now we just use AIS to get all that information, plus their boat speed.'

'We use it day and night and even have a computer printout that shows our average speed of the last 6-7 hours so we can check how we are doing.'

'As a watch captain I try not to be so, reliant on it. When we get into a good mode, you get thrown off when you see a competitor is shown on AIS as doing a couple of knots more, and the reaction is to quickly change something to respond, instead of sticking to your own game.'

Houston agrees that it now seems that a lot of boats are just watching their performance numbers on AIS, compared to their competitors and using that as a basis for tactical decision-making.

'A lot of tactical decisions are being made on the basis of AIS', says Houston. ‘Maybe in the last leg we should have tacked up with Brunel and SCA, and gone north. But we were with the top three boats and wanted to stay with the pack, and didn’t want to be left behind.

To date the Volvo Ocean Race has been sailed in light to moderate conditions - whether that continues in the Southern Ocean Leg remains to be seen. If the traditional hard driving conditions prevail for the next Leg, then a third dimension may be added to the Volvo Ocean Race paradigm.