Gustav Morin/Ericsson 3/Volvo OCean Race
Northern exposure. Almost time to put away the thermals and get out the floppy hats and sun block
Thursday 20 November, 2008 10:00 GMT
THE TEN ZULU REPORT, LEG 2, DAY 6
By Mark Chisnell
Overnight, the fleet slammed the handbrake on and slid off the exit ramp – headed north to Cochin, the Run to the Sun, looking for a little more Northern Exposure, a little more light. Almost time to put away the thermals and get out the floppy hats and sun block. But they need to make sure it was the right exit, and they don’t end up in the wrong part of town ...
Torben Grael and his Ericsson 4 team maintained their blistering pace and blasted through the scoring gate at 58degE at about 03:45 ZULU, to take the maximum four points and reinforce their overall lead. They were followed by their team mates aboard Ericsson 3 just before the 07:00 Position Report – scoring 3.5 points and a one-two for Team Ericsson.
Next were Green Dragon, at 08:40-ish, to take the final place on the podium, clipped wing and all. Team Russia snuck over in fourth, just before the TEN ZULU deadline to grab some valuable points. The race east is almost over, the race north has begun.
At 10:00 ZULU everyone was on port gybe, heading north-east in a west-northwesterly breeze that was hovering between the high teens and the low 20s in wind speed. Looking from north-west to south-east, in the front row were PUMA, Ericsson 3 and Ericsson 4, with a second row of Team Telefonica, Delta Lloyd and Team Russia.
The line-up in the race for the rest of the gate points is slightly different, and for this I suggest you check out the Bearing to Waypoint (BRG_WPT in the Position Data Table in the Data Centre). As I mentioned yesterday, because the waypoint is set to the northern end of the gate, then the smaller the number, the closer they are – when it gets to zero, they’re at the gate.
That gives us PUMA and the two Telefonica boats with all to play for, and Delta Lloyd bringing up the rear.
Dragon and PUMA are going at a reasonable pace
One other thing worth noting is that once they pass the scoring gate, the individual boat’s waypoint is then moved onto the finish line – so for Ericsson 4, at 07:00 Cochin was at a bearing of 23 degrees, with just over 3000 miles to sail. For those the other side of the gate, this has an impact on their Distance to Finish (DTF) – and therefore the Distance to Leader (DTL) – as until they have passed the scoring gate, the distances are calculated via the scoring waypoint. We just have to live with this (it’s a computer, it applies rules rigorously), but once they are clear of the scoring gate it will all make sense.
The wounded, but still battling, Dragon and PUMA, have both got their boats going at a reasonable pace. PUMA’s speed picked back up in the early afternoon yesterday, and they’ve been averaging something pretty close to the boats near them since then.
Ken Read talked the whole thing through with Guy Swindells yesterday afternoon – they’ll be all right, as long as they don’t run out of carbon fibre and resin to fix the boat up with…
Green Dragon was the furthest boat south yesterday evening, and I think they got there because their lack of a boom forces them to sail a narrower True Wind Angle (TWA in the Data Centre) to maintain the speed. So understandably, they were the first boat to gybe last night, just before the 19:00 Position Report, and they were the only boat not to wait for the True Wind Direction (TWD) to veer (rotate clockwise) to the west, as we talked about at the end of yesterday’s TEN ZULU.
They were followed by Team Russia and Delta Lloyd at 21:00, then PUMA and Telefonica Black just after the 22:00 Position Report. The final group went either side of midnight, with Telefonica Blue and Ericsson 3 just before, and Ericsson 4 the last to go a few minutes into the new day.
The boat tracks in the Race Viewer tell us how much time they sailed in the westerly before they gybed. The curve to the south indicates the wind shifting from south-west to west, and taking them further from both Cochin, and the scoring gate.
The high is going to become the central hurdle
The Volvo Open 70s sail downwind symmetrically, at a TWA of about 140 degrees on one or other gybe, either side of the wind direction. So in a wind blowing directly from the west, they can sail east just as fast on either port or starboard gybe – and everyone except Green Dragon waited for this moment before making the turn.
We can see all this in today’s graph, showing the True Wind Direction veering steadily from mid afternoon (sorry about the scale, trying to get this fixed, if you take the number away from 360 you get the actual TWD). It also shows the True Wind Speed (TWS) easing overnight, as the low pressure system that they have been riding finally escaped to the east. It looks to have bottomed out in the high teens for most boats, before starting to pick up again, as the new low pressure approaches.
So far, so good. But now they have all finally turned left, the high pressure system that we mentioned (spinning up off the east coast of South Africa) a couple of days ago is going to become the central hurdle between the fleet and some blissful trade wind sailing.
In her latest analysis, Race Forecaster, Jennifer Lilly describes this high pressure expanding to the east, along with the approach and strengthening of the new low pressure system to the south.
If you want to see all this, the best way is to go to the Race Viewer and click on the ‘three wind arrows’ icon in the title bar. Then go to the bottom of the page where you can click forward through the weather forecast using the buttons. If you switch between 0 and +12 you can see the high pressure expanding massively eastwards before it gets broken up at +24, and pushed back to the west by the low pressure.
Picking the moment to gybe was all about riding the breeze from the low pressure across the try line for the scoring gate, then getting around the eastern edge of the high pressure. Those who got it wrong risked losing places at the scoring gate … or getting caught by the centre of the expanding high, and stuck in a sand trap.
We don’t need too much more of the 50+ action right now
The reason the boats at the back of the fleet haven’t gybed early and tried to cut the corner is because of the risk of getting stuck in the high pressure centre by not being far enough east. Although it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if someone had gybed a couple of days ago and tried to get north ahead of the expansion of the high eastwards. Conversely, gybe too late and you’ll get hammered by the breeze from that low pressure – and there are a few boats and people who don’t need too much more of the 50+ knot action right now.
This morning’s Deckman for Windows Predicted Route is set up for Ericsson 4’s position at 09:00 – it thinks that the way through this is to ride the north-westerly breeze on the leading edge of the cold front to the north-east. Then the wind will slowly back (rotate anti-clockwise) all the way round to the south as the boats slide round the eastern side of the high (we’re in the southern hemisphere, with the wind flowing anti-clockwise round the centre, so positioned at three o’clock, the wind is blowing from the south), and from there it’s a smooth transition into the south-easterly trade winds – oh joy!
I’ve set the weather on the Predicted Route image to early in the morning of the 22nd, and you can see the kink in the Predicted Route (the north-south red line) where it crosses the isochrone (the east-west red line), at just the moment when the routing thinks they should gybe in the southerly.
I think everyone has a version of this strategy in mind, and we can see the outcome in the Predicted Table in the Data Centre. Check out the Five Day Predicted Leg Position (+5DPLP) and the Five Day Predicted Distance to Leader (+5DPDTL) and you’ll see that the Ericsson twins should pop out into the lead, but PUMA will hold third, if they can hold their boat together. But is it still an 'if'?
The TEN ZULU REPORT (so called because it follows the 10:00 GMT fleet position report, and Zulu is the meteorologist's name for GMT).