18 February 2012
Nannini and Ramon are into the lead
At 01:00 GMT on Saturday morning, Marco Nannini and Hugo Ramon stopped their dive south, bounced off latitude 60S within miles of a high pressure zone’s windless core and - three hours later – took the lead of the Global Ocean Race (GOR) with Class40 Financial Crisis. Making the best speed averages of the trio, Nick Leggatt and Phillippa Hutton-Squire continue to gain ground on the leaders with Phesheya-Racing as they approach the known iceberg area south-east of the bluQube Scoring gate below 55S.
Since taking the lead early on Saturday, Nannini and Ramon have managed to average one knot faster than Cessna Citation. “The battle with Cessna continues on the high seas,” reports Nannini. For the Italian-Spanish team on Financial Crisis, the tack north-east taken by Conrad Colman and Adrian Kuttel with Cessna Citation on Friday played into their hands. “We welcomed their move as we know that as long as we are in the same winds, we cannot beat a latest generation boat,” says Nannini of Colman’s Akilaria RC2. “It's like a very slow game of chess where each move takes days to show its merits or prove to be an error.”
At 15:00 GMT on Saturday, the moves on Financial Crisis were paying well and a lead of 30 miles had been built with Nannini and Ramon 60 miles to the south of Colman and Kuttel as the headwinds continued. “We have had a bit of luck with the weather helping us catch them when they got away after the first ten days of racing,” Nannini concedes. “Upwind we can still play cat and mouse, but soon when the wind shifts and we'll be reaching, we will struggle to keep the same speeds.”
While the leaders wait for the wind shift down by 60S, Nick Leggatt and Phillippa Hutton-Squire are continuing to make good speed downwind reducing the distance deficit as they slide south through the Furious Fifties. “At the moment we’re sailing in a cold, grey fog with the Garmin radar on permanent watch for icebergs,” reported Phillippa Hutton-Squire early on Saturday as they edge closer to the area below 55S and between 120-110W where icebergs have been recorded by satellite imagery. On Saturday afternoon, the South African duo was also around 300 miles NNW of the two icebergs confirmed visually by Colman and Kuttel on Thursday.
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