Thur 09 October 2008 13:47:18
Leg One Preview: Alicante to Cape Town
Distance: 6,500 nautical miles. Est days at sea: 22.6. ETA: 3rd November 2008
Start course information
By Mark Chisnell
The first leg of the Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09 will be a bit like meeting an old friend that you don’t quite recognize to start with – the first section from Alicante to Gibraltar is a first for this race, it’s never been sailed in the Mediterranean before. But once the yachts clear out into the open Atlantic things will start to look very familiar.
It’s not long after the autumn equinox, traditionally a time of unsettled weather. And while we all think of the Med as a place of balmy nights and warm evenings, that isn’t necessarily the case in the autumn. So the fleet could face anything in the battle to be first out through the gates of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic.
The 2007-08 Barcelona Race fleet faced days of chronic Mediterranean light air, but there’s just as good a chance of a howling north-easterly wind direction giving them a fast run down the coast.
On Thursday morning, Volvo Ocean Race forecaster, Jennifer Lilly, was backing the latter - although she felt there was still little consensus amongst the meteorological models on conditions for the start.
There is low pressure sitting to the south and north-west of Alicante, and high pressure to the north-east and south-west. That leaves the race course vulnerable to whichever system develops more strongly over the next three days.
Quick out of the blocks
At the moment, Jennifer reckons that the north-east to easterly wind currently battering the race village will ease into Saturday – giving us maybe 20 knots for the start. The boats will be quick out of the blocks, sailing downwind with spinnakers, but there is a good chance the brakes will come on as they approach Gibraltar in lighter breeze.
As if flaky weather wasn’t enough to worry about - there is plenty of the rocky hard stuff between Alicante and the Atlantic. Coastal effects will almost certainly be important – the heat generated, day time ‘sea breezes’ (if the sun comes out) and the night drainage of cold air from high land. And we shouldn’t forget Cabo Palos poking out into the highway.
The fleet will have to round it before they can properly head south-west. Then comes Cabo Gata – steep, high cliffs, with very localized wind conditions. But after that they are likely to steer clear of the Bay of Malaga, which is renowned for light winds. The next stop is Punta Europa, the beginning of the Straits of Gibraltar and the exit ramp from the Mediterranean.
It’s this final part - getting through the Straits – that could be the toughest section. There’s strong current running through there (more than strong, says my local knowledge source, Helena de la Gandara – ‘it’s actually like England’). And given that the channel is only about eight nautical miles wide, the fleet will be forced to contend with the traffic separation schemes and exclusion zones, which the skippers and navigators will ignore at their peril.
(I asked Mike Quilter (race veteran, previous winner and navigation adviser to Ericsson) how much his old skipper, Grant Dalton, got fined for blasting through the wrong side of the Dover Straits at Mach 2 on Club Med – but Mike contends it was nothing to do with him, and he knows nothing ...)
Step on the travellator
In a perfect world, once out into the Atlantic the fleet would find the trade winds blowing strong, and step on the travellator to the Doldrums. But much will depend on the position of the Azores High - this is a large high pressure area named after the island chain it typically squats on. It determines the position of the trade winds, the north-easterly breeze that runs from Portugal down the west coast of Africa.
I’m not going to be so foolish as to try to make a call on what’s going to happen at this point from four days out. But the danger is that the fleet will find themselves struggling in the Horse Latitudes of the Azores High. So called because desperate square rigger skippers - trapped in the light wind and heaving, oily seas that characterize this part of the Atlantic - would throw the horses overboard to save food and water for their crew. Get too close to the centre of the high pressure and this will be your fate …
heading south, the fleet will have to make a decision on where and how to pass the Canary and Cape Verde Islands. If they get too close, particularly at night, boats can find themselves trapped in the lee of one of these high islands, with no wind. But equally, during the day the islands can create useful sea breezes.
Next on the ‘things to worry about’ list is the Doldrums – also known by the rather less catchy moniker of intertropical convergence zone or ITCZ. This name does tell you a bit more about what’s involved though – essentially a region of low pressure that surrounds the earth roughly at the equator. It occurs because warm, moist air rises, and there’s plenty of that in the tropical area of the equator.
Cooler air from the north and south of the ITCZ is sucked in to replace this rising air, and this helps form the north-easterly trade winds of the northern hemisphere, and the south-easterly trade winds of the southern hemisphere.
The last time I had to write this kind of preview – back in 1997 – part of the trick going into the Doldrums was to set up for the passage to Fernando de Noronha, the scoring gate in the South Atlantic.
The thinking was that if you exited into the south-east trade winds too far west, you’d end up hard on the wind. Received wisdom had it that the sweet spot was historically around the longitude of 27-28W, but depending on the conditions, anything between 25W and 30W could work.
But these days I think opinion has shifted a little - now the priority in traversing the Doldrums is picking the thinnest point to cross, usually to the west. It was winner, ABN AMRO’s rule of thumb in the last race not to let anyone get west of them on the approach to the Doldrums.
As they got this rule from the aforementioned Mike Quilter, now working for Ericsson, I suspect we’ll see them execute a similar strategy.
The difference will be in how the boat’s get to the west – and forgive me, but this part is a little more technical. If the fleet does sail straight from Gibraltar into the north-easterly trade winds they have a problem.
A Volvo Open 70 can sail fast in two directions downwind in a north-easterly breeze – south or west. Every mile you sail south will take you closer to Cape Town, but further from the strategic goal of getting west for the Doldrums.
Crossing the Doldrums
While every mile you sail west, takes you no closer to the finish (and inevitably will drop you down the leaderboard compared to anyone sailing south), but sets you up in a better position for crossing the Doldrums.
It will be interesting to see how the teams react to these twins pressures of wanting to stay at the front of the fleet, and wanting to get the long-term strategy right. It will be the first of many such dilemmas.
Once into the Doldrums, the priority is crossing quickly – Grant Dalton is a big fan of this strategy – get south as fast as you can. All that hot air rising (sounds like an album by a seventies prog rock band) leads to a lot of thunderstorms and squalls.
The crews will need to anticipate the cloud’s behaviour, and change trim and sails fast to keep the boats moving south to escape back into the trades.
But once into the south-east trade winds, it’s more champagne sailing as they line up to hurdle the next barrier - the South Atlantic High. The Azores High has a mirror sister sitting in the South Atlantic (sometimes called the St Helena High for the island where Napoleon ended his days).
It blocks the route to the south, but with a scoring gate at Fernando de Noronha, the fleet will already find itself to the west of the centre of the high, and the boats will try to work their way down this side, looking for weather systems forming off the coast of Brazil to help them on their way. The winning strategy has usually been to get south fast.
Cape Town lies at 34S, and the Southern Ocean is usually thought to start at 40S – the Roaring Forties of legend, but that’s a stark line, and the weather is never that simple. So as they head south in search of the low pressure systems that roll unremittingly from west to east around Antarctica, hoping to catch a ride, the yachts may well find themselves in Southern Ocean conditions – big waves, big westerly breezes and cold, time to break out those vacuum packed thermals …
The final barrier to Cape Town is the Cape itself – it’s a renowned sticky spot, calms and light wind historically dominate the final approach, and crank up the stress levels for anyone involved in a tight finish.
But there’re a lot of miles to go before we have to worry about that … Just remember, the winner of the first leg, almost always wins the race.
Related Links
Leg 1 Start Course information
Overall StandingsPosition Team Points
1 Telefonica Blue 4.0
2 Telefonica Black 3.5
3 Puma 3.0
4 Ericsson 4 2.5
5 Green Dragon Team 2.0
6 Delta Lloyd 1.0
7 Ericsson 3 0.5
8 Team Russia 0.5
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