Bulletin: 24th November 2007

Another day at the helm!

The pace of this Barcelona World Race has not dropped off on this fourteenth day of racing. Contrary to that of the Canaries archipelago, the passage of the Cape Verde islands, won't generate any big separation. Even though it's conceded a few miles whilst crossing the archipelago, Paprec-Virbac is still controlling the fleet. The averages remain high, the boats continue their dive southwards towards the formidable inter-tropical convergence zone, which the leaders will begin to feel the effects of from tomorrow. 

With a little W’ly separation nevertheless, Temenos II was still suffering from a light drop in the pace, most likely due to the influence of the Cape Verde islands as Dominique indicated to us earlier. “For the past 3 hours, the wind has dropped off a lot. We have less than fifteen knots of breeze but we've still got big seas. It is preventing the boat from getting into a rhythm, the spinnaker still barely holding. There's not thirty-six ways to get round it so we’re being forced to continue on the helm. We should come out of this zone soon and find a little more wind.”

Next difficulty the Doldrums

This infernal pace imposes a minimum amount of service aboard the boats, and with 12 hours spent at the helm each skipper must eat into their periods of sleep in order to look into the weather files. For almost 24 hours, the skippers have been trying to work on the next course obstacle, crossing the Doldrums, and in view of the various trajectories, not all of them have decided to pass in the same place.

“It’s intriguing, even though the Doldrums are shaping up to be fairly inactive, the slight East West separation within the fleet may generate a few differences at the exit. I would have preferred it to be a little more difficult for the frontrunners," jokes Dominique, “but there will doubtless be some more opportunities to make up the delay later.”

With over 22,000 miles left to race, this should indeed be the case!