Volvo Ocean Race: Scallywag and Azkonobel co-leaders
by Richard Gladwell, Sail-World.com/nz 24 Feb 2018 02:29 PST
Leg 6 to Auckland, day 17 on board Sun hung Kai / Scallywag. Annemieke Bes enjoying the ride, Scallywag is still leading the fleet at 4 days from arrival. 24 February, © Jeremie Lecaudey / Volvo Ocean Race
Although SHK Scallywag is shown as topping the leaderboard from the last sched at 0700UTC on February 24, the Predictwind routing shows that while she has the lead using the ECMWF feed to calculate estimated finish times, a second feed (GFS) has her in second place, behind Team AzkoNobel.
(In the 1900hrs on February 24, UTC position update, Predictwind Routing showed that Scallywag would be first to finish on both weather feeds - in GFS by 9hrs and on ECMWF by just two and a half hours.)
The routing has changed again with two of the four feeds available in Predictwind opting for a course close to the Great Circle route, or shortest distance to Auckland. However they are still showing a significantly later finishing time - in one instance a thumping 27hours slower.
Scallywag is behind AzkoNobel using the GFS feed by about 90minutes - the same margin that Scallywag is ahead of AzkoNobel using the weather data from the ECMWF feed.
Although Team Brunel is shown as being second on the official leaderboard for the sched, she is at least fourth on the basis of projected finishing times.
A finish some time on Wednesday February 28 is likely, with one projection showing late Tuesday night NZDT.
The difficulty for the boats remains an area of calm and shifting winds that is predicted to develop around North Cape at top of New Zealand about the time the Volvo fleet attempts to pass through. It is likely they will shift back into inshore racing mode and play the shifts and local breezes to get through the flat spot and indeed down the Northland coast.
On board Overall race leader MAPFRE who are not having a great race so far, skipper Xabi Fernandez reports:
Hi all,
Looks like we are under 4 days to go! It really feels like we have been sailing forever in this leg. I can hardly remember when we were sailing towards Japan almost 3 weeks ago and so much has happened since then.
The weather keeps changing quite a lot in the files we receive during the day. Sometimes we are more optimistic after seeing them and sometimes it is a bit harder but one thing is for sure, the weather is changing and we have almost 1000nm to go so we will keep our hope till the very end.
The crew keeps working very well, pushing the boat as much as possible in these trade winds we are sailing right now with around 16-20 knots of wind speed.
Having as much rest as possible and getting ready for any opportunity that may come at the end of the race.
Our particular race with DongFeng keeps being exhausting and we all know it is going to be that way the whole way to Auckland, let’s see how it finishes. Hopefully we can have Brunel on the battle too.
Best regards.
Xabi
To hear Bianca Cook (NZL - TTOP) - click here
and for Blair Tuke (NZL - MAPFRE) - click here