Coming up is probably one of the most difficult weather scenarios the navigators – Dongfeng Race Team’s Pascal Bidegorry among them – will face as they tackle the Doldrums in the western Pacific but then the aftermath of Cyclone Gita.
Right now the Doldrums look relatively straightforward and then there is a passage of northwesterlies, but after that things look very uncertain as Gita moves slowly westwards, south of the fleet, towards the Australian Gold Coast, leaving a huge area of light and variable winds behind it.
The latest position reports still have Team AkzoNobel leading at a position about 1,000 nautical miles north-northwest of the leg waypoint at Santa Ana Island on the eastern edge of San Cristobal in the Solomons group.
But the Dutch boat skippered by Simeon Tienpont is beginning to slow down as she starts to leave the northeast trades and tackle the Doldrums with her boatspeed clocked at just 6.7 knots.
Behind her in second place MAPFRE (+28) was still making 16 knots with Dongfeng listed in fourth place (Team Sun Hung Kai/Scallywag is third +34), seven miles behind MAPFRE and making a similar speed.
More interesting is the lateral spread of the fleet because, while Dongfeng and MAPFRE are still very close to each other, the rest of the fleet is spread over nearly 100 miles of ocean, northeast-southwest. This is bound to affect the relative progress of the boats through the Doldrums in the next day or so.
The match race between Dongfeng and MAPFRE over the last few days has been intriguing to watch. The two crews in the red boats have been in visual contact and have been watching each other like hawks, as the MAPFRE skipper Xabi Fernandez admitted in a recent interview on board the Spanish boat.
“Our goal is to win this leg but before we do that we have to be ahead of Dongfeng,” he said sitting on the stern of MAPFRE with the red and white sails of Dongfeng clearly visible a few hundred metres behind him.
“So we have to be careful,” Fernandez added. “We normally have a plan but, as I have said before, we have to keep an eye on Dongfeng for now, especially when there are uncertain moments such as the Doldrums or transitions when you don’t really know what the wind is going to do. It does not mean our rival is going to change all our plans but, for sure, we have to be very careful.”
Latest position report at 0700 UTC:
1. Team AkzoNobel. DTF: 2,706.8nm
2. MAPFRE. DTL: 27.7nm
3. Team Sun Hung Kai / Scallywag. DTL: 34.2nm
4. Dongfeng Race Team. DTL: 35.3nm
5. Team Brunel. DTL: 45.8nm
6. Turn the Tide on Plastic. DTL: 83.0nm
7. Vestas 11th Hour Racing. DNS.
