Friday, 16th June 2006
Race 9 Starts
It’s been a varied and eventful first night of racing for the Clipper fleet as Race 9 starts from Panama to Port Antonio, Jamaica. The race was started by Ewan Hind, the skipper of Victoria Clipper which s the Duty Boat for this race, and they got underway in a Le Mans start at 1930 UTC (1430 local time). They had drawn the starting line up out of a hat while still in Shelter Bay, and the order was, from east to west (also windward to leeward): westernaustralia.com, Jersey, Glasgow, New York, Durban, Cardiff, Qingdao, Liverpool, Singapore and Victoria.
The Le Mans start method is used when the race start is away from the traditional marked line. The yachts all line up in the direction of the course with just their indexsails up, and once the Duty Boat is happy that everyone is lined up fairly the start signal is given, and headsails are hoisted.
The weather has been very tropical for them so far. Panama is just at the northern end of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (the Doldrums), and so is subject to quite squally and unpredictable weather. The fleet saw a waterspout (see Victoria’s latest diary) just before the start, and after half an hour or so of solid sailing the wind died completely over the afternoon, prompting this comment from Ewan Hind: “Now (1800LT) have zero wind, zero speed, zero steerage.” This picked up as the night went on, and they now have about 15 knots of breeze from just south of east, typical trade wind conditions. As they go further north, away from the ITCZ, these should consolidate and give more reliable drive to the fleet.
This means that there will not be much to be gained by yachts going dramatically off the beaten track. The gains and losses on this race will be down to concentration, trim and plain hard work, with the yacht that makes the best use of what will be quite similar conditions coming out the winner.
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