21.10.2006
EXTREME CONDITIONS FORECAST FOR FIRST DAY AT SEA
At 1300 local time (1100GMT) tomorrow, six of the eight boats competing in the VELUX 5 OCEANS will take the start line of the event's opening leg. Roughly 12,000 miles long, the leg will see the boats depart Bilbao, northern Spain, round Cape Finistere (the northwesternmost tip of Spain), sail down the Portugese coast and on through the Doldrums, across the Equator, on south then east into the remote freezing wastes of the Southern Ocean before emerging into the Antipodean summer at Fremantle, near Perth, West Australia. This first leg is expected to take around 45-50 days.
While the forecast for the start tomorrow is a modest 12-15 knots from the south, the first few days, particularly once the boats are heading south having rounded Cape Finisterre, look set to be brutal, and skippers can expect to a bone shaker of a ride, crashing upwind in winds of around 35 knots for several days.
If the start forecast holds true, the Gods will be truly smiling on the VELUX 5 OCEANS fleet as pretty much ever since the boats arrived Bilbao has been lashed on and off by winds as strong as 60 knots. To date this has caused damage to many of the boats, either to their hulls from riding up on to the pontoon or, in the case of Graham Dalton, the wind picking up his mast while it was out of the boat laid out on a series of trestles, smashing the carbon spar on the ground, despite it being tied down.
Working for Alex Thomson's Hugo Boss team is Andrew Cape, a veteran navigator with several Whitbread Round the World Race or Volvo Ocean Races under his belt - mostly recently with the Spanish movistar team. "The general situation is that there is a front coming onto the land, or the west coast tonight which will hang there for a while and give the boats the opportunity to start and then start reaching along the coast in a south wind, going southwest," summarises Cape.
As the boats are sailing west along the north coast of Spain and then on round Cape Ortegal and Cape Finisterre on Monday, conditions will start to get severe. Covering the 60 mile stretch between the two Capes, the skippers could well find themselves in survival mode. "That'll be a pretty hard stretch because it'll be picking up very rapidly to 30 to 35 knots as an active front approaches. And it also accelerates around the point so it is all conspiring to make it pretty uncomfortable after Saturday night," warns Cape. "The northwestern side will be very knarly. I'm calling Cape Finisterre, the new Cape Horn. It is going to be a rough one this time and it will be an achievement to get around there. It is a mixture of gusts, swell, acceleration from the mountains. It is a really bad combo of weather they are going to expect on the second day."
From Cape Finisterre the forecast indicates the wind will flick between southerly and southwesterly and could blow up to around 35-40 knots for several days. Cape reckons they are likely to encounter strong headwinds of this type until the time the boats are passing Gibraltar. These start conditions mean that any weaknesses any of the boats may have are likely to show up rapidly.
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