Volvo Ocean Race: AkzoNobel defends a shrinking lead
by Richard Gladwell, Sail-World.com/nz 23 Feb 2018 13:56 PST
24 February 2018
Leg 6 to Auckland, day 16 on board Sun hung Kai / Scallywag. Annemieke Bes happy about the last position report putting us in second place, 7.8 miles behind AkzoNobel. 23 February, © Jeremie Lecaudey / Volvo Ocean Race
Despite being shown in third place overall by the Volvo Ocean Race tracker, third-ranked team AkzoNobel still leads the Volvo Ocean Race according to the routing function of Predictwind.com.
Using the time to finish method of calculating finishing places and race leadership, rather than distance to finish, little has changed since the last report.
Team AkzoNobel is predicted to finish in Auckland on February 28 just after midnight local time according to one weather feed or 0720hrs according to the other.
She will be 2hours ahead of the second place getter SHK Scallywag, according to one feed and just an hour according to the other. The second mentioned feed ECMWF was predicting a margin of four hours at the previous report that Sail-World plotted, 12 hours ago.
Volvo Ocean Race only supplies the boats with two feeds GFS and ECMWF, and those are the two feeds quoted above. A third feed (not visible to the boats) recommends taking an even more extreme course - a semi-circle with its zenith closer to the Australian coast, passing close to Lord Howe Island. However, there is little difference in finish time from the GFS feed which is the one predicting the earliest finish time.
There is a new more direct route being plotted - while it is the shortest in terms of distance it is the slowest in terms of time to finish (by 100nm) it is almost 24hours slower than GFS (the soonest to finish).
The other interesting aspect that has emerged in the last 12 hours is that average speeds have dropped - by a massive 3kts in the case of AkzoNobel in the case of GFS which is the more radical course (green dots) and .8kt on the other feed (ECMWF).
For SHK Scallywag the average speed has also dropped but only by 1-2kts.
Reading between the lines on all that information and margins the routing would tend to show that both VOR feeds show the wind becoming lighter than earlier predicted. It also shows the more direct of the two courses ECMWF coming more into play (ie having less risk than the wider, longer, but still fastest GFS course.
As the fleet gets closer to Auckland and if that trend continues, then SHK Scallywag on the inside of the two boats could come more into play - given that the predicted finish delta between the two boats has reduced from four hours to two hours in the past 12 hours.
It seems that the fleet will miss the benefit of an advancing area of strong wind, coming out of the SW Tasman Sea and that winds will get lighter and maybe come ahead as the boats make their final approach North Cape, and at that juncture, the race should open up again.