Vendée Globe Race - Day 20: Another change, as storm stalks fleet leaders
by Vendee Globe Media/Richard Gladwell, Sail-World NZ 1 Dec 2024 03:05 GMT
1 December 2024
Pip Hare - Medallia - IMOCA - November 29, 2024 © Pip Hare
Yoann Richomme Paprec Arkéa has taken up the front running on Day 20 of the Vendee Globe 2024 Race. With the four race leaders well into the Southern Ocean, they are now almost 100nm ahead of the fifth placed competitor - Jérémie Beyou (Charal).
“It wasn't planned for me to take the lead again,” Richomme told Vendee Race Media. “I don't really know what happened. The wind must have been a bit twisted. I played my trajectory – there's nothing strategic about it, I'm just following my route and it put me in the lead. We had quite a bit of wind last night. We did a big sprint… super fast, with peaks of over 30 knots, which isn’t necessarily a thrill here.”
He was one of a number of competitors throughout the fleet having to keep close track of nearby boats to avoid risk of collision. “I found myself side by side with Seb Simon who has an AIS that transmits less than a mile away. Suddenly, when I heard the alarm, I jumped out of my bunk!” Richomme added.
Looking ahead, the leading boats will face a new problem later this week - the arrival of a strong southern depression scheduled for Wednesday. “We don’t really know how to handle it,” says Richomme. “Usually, we go around this kind of system to the north to escape the worst of the sea but this time the escape route is very far away, so we might be tempted to go south. I don't think it's a huge race issue in terms of winning, but rather in terms of safety.” Either way, it’s a decision that must be made tomorrow morning."
Projections done using Predictwind's weather routing function show that with the current weather data, the front runner will be worst affected around December 5, with gusts of 60kts being expected for several hours. The routing is not recommending any option to avoid the storm, however no doubt the competitors will be punching in a few strong wind avoidance parameters to assess whether it is better to try and sail out of the storms projected path, and avoid the worst of it.
The competitors who are a thousand miles back don't seem to be as badly affected as the colour coding on the Predictwind maps would tend to indicate, with Sam Davies shown as seeing only 40kts, when the dark colour of the wind map would usually indicate at least 10kts more.
Those 1500nm back like Pip Hare, would also seem to be spared the storm's passage, however they are yet to round the Cape of Good Hope and as we have been seeing for a couple of weeks, these aggressive weather systems are being generated in the South Atlantic and then flying around the southern ocean altitudes, before spinning off and losing intensity.
In the daggerboard group 2000nm back behind the race leaders, Jean Le Cam and Duc are currently among eight competitors separated by only 110 miles, though they are in very different weather.
Between the lead quartet and the first daggerboard boats, Justine Mettraux (Teamwork-Team SNEF), Clarisse Crémer (L’Occitane en Provence) and Boris Herrmann (Malizia - Sea Explorer) are less than two miles apart, but all in the influence of the St Helena high pressure system. The light winds, sunny weather and gentle sea state gave Crémer opportunity to catch up on maintenance, including repairs to the hydrogenerator and attending to chafe on running rigging.
Herrmann, who was almost becalmed earlier today, shared his frustration: “Sitting inside the boat becomes difficult, looking at the screen, looking at the tracker. We made such a beautiful preparation of a new boat for four years. We could go at 20 knots... but instead here we are. It makes me a bit sad. I wish I could cry sometimes, but most of the time that emotion is positive. I'm doing what I need to do and I can change the position I am in.”
By contrast, Pip Hare (Medallia) is more upbeat: “This is the most competitive edition of the race ever, and there are so many boats and everyone is so close in terms of their performance potential within each of the little groups. And when you make a mistake, you pay. In the last couple of months before the start I went out and found some bigger conditions to understand just a tiny bit more about the boat. We can never replicate the waves in the Southern Ocean, but I've been sailing in big breeze, so I've got a bit of a strategy in my head of how I'm going to deal with it. We'll see how that pans out in reality."
Sam Goodchild (Vulnerable) is still the first second generation foiling boat by a large margin, some 250 miles behind the leaders, despite problems encountered overnight. “I’ve had a very busy 12 hours,” he says. “It started last night with the rudder kicking up - the system holding the rudder down broke. The technical team helped me fix that and we got the rudder back down, so that was good.
Then we spent the night with anywhere between 10 knots and 30 knots. So trying to pick the right sail is easier said than done. This morning we started nose diving, which is the Achilles heel in this boat. We had a massive one where everything went flying and the boat ended up on its side. I was trying to cook breakfast and hot water went flying over the boat and landed just next to me.
So I put a smaller sail up, but that took about 45 minutes instead of 15 for various little reasons. I guess I'm tired, doing silly things badly. But I'm happy to be going again with a small FRO up and we're off again.”
Further back the rest of the fleet is also preparing for the strong winds of the south. "Since yesterday I have been in a zone of strong winds south of the St Helena high,” says Isabelle Joschke (MACSF). “Symbolically, that means that it is starting up again at full speed, I have left the light airs of the Atlantic to return to the Indian Ocean. I have put the boat in a configuration for the south, changed the sails, replaced important lines, stacked my sails at the back… In a few days I'll round the Cape of Good Hope and it'll be like starting a new race."