The final outcome of Leg 4 from China to New Zealand remained far from certain today as the fleet set up to round the island of New Caledonia while a complex and rapidly changing weather scenario raised prospects of a leaderboard shuffle on the final approach to Auckland.
The even spilt in the fleet which has prevailed for the past week began to diminish today as the leading pair, Groupama sailing team and PUMA Ocean Racing powered by BERG tried to translate their easterly separation into genuine distance ahead and Telefónica and CAMPER finally abandoned the west.
The fleet look most likely to round the 300 mile long land mass to the west before heading for Auckland and to avoid the huge wind shadow thrown by its mountainous terrain the teams will need to push well south before making the left turn.
Also driving the teams’ headlong rush to the south is a light wind zone developing close behind the fleet threatening to compress the standings if it overruns the fleet.
For Mike Sanderson’s six placed older generation boat Team Sanya, the unpredictable conditions could mean a chance to beat at least one of the new boats to Auckland — a scalp which Sanderson says the Sanya crew justly deserve.
“I think there are plenty of opportunities,” he said. “We are being chased down by light airs behind us so the whole fleet is racing south to try and escape its clutches. We are only just hanging on by the skin of our teeth.
“Until the Solomons we were pretty pleased how we were staying with the fleet,” he said. “Obviously Telefónica is on the march that’s for sure but in relation to CAMPER and Abu Dhabi we are in pretty similar shape as to when the fleet rotated south more than 2,500 miles ago.
“So we are quite pleased with ourselves over that. It’s been a great performance and the guys have done an awesome job of sailing the boat.
“In the back of my mind I really feel like we deserve to beat someone on this leg so I certainly hope that from New Caledonia to New Zealand can be our turn,” Sanderson concluded.
The battle royale for fourth place between Chris Nicholson’s CAMPER with Emirates Team New Zealand and Ian Walker’s Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing continued to be close despite the huge lateral separation between the teams.
“We are in there with those guys (Abu Dhabi) and to an extent PUMA trying to get south at the moment,” said CAMPER skipper Chris Nicholson today.
“We have got a huge separation east west on them and at the moment the way forward for us out in the west looks OK — but we are looking at it changing hourly.”
At 1300 UTC Abu Dhabi were ahead by just 0.2 nautical miles (nm) after CAMPER and Telefónica both tacked towards the east as their breeze dropped below 10 knots, prompting second placed PUMA to follow suit.
Nicholson cautioned that the potential effect of New Caledonia on the prevailing easterly wind should not be taken lightly.
“The land shadow will be big,” he said. “It’s amazing the effect these mountains have on the breeze in this part of the world. We went under an island yesterday and we were 60 miles away and we felt the wind shadow from that very hard on us. So we will be careful of that and continue on our journey south.”
Nicholson said he was keeping a very open mind about the final section from New Caledonia to Auckland where he reckoned absolutely anything could happen.
There’s opportunities here I think for every team at the moment — and that ranges between a first or a last in this leg,” he said. “Certainly nothing can be taken for granted at the moment.”
On Abu Dhabi Ian Walker admitted frustration over so far not getting the advantage he had anticipated after fighting for eastern leverage and losing ground to third placed overall race leaders, Iker Martínez’s Team Telefónica.
“It’s tough,” he said. “We are not making the gain in the east we might have expected and Telefónica seems to be moving forward.
“I think we are quite close with CAMPER and still ahead of Sanya so I hope our easterly position pays. Maybe the leaders will slow down in lighter winds towards the finish and maybe the whole fleet will compress.
“We will see — I guess Groupama will be hoping nothing changes,” he added.
Meanwhile, on Franck Cammas’ Groupama sailing team the long time leg leaders were trying to laugh off some of the more nightmarish scenarios their routing software threw up.
“When running the routing for the top three boats, you can see that the first one is still largely ahead with 500 miles to go till the finish,” said Media Crew Member (MCM) Yann Riou.
“Then it gets caught up in a windless zone which it can’t get out of whilst two pursuers calmly go around the zone and end up with a lead of 11 hours.
“Of course this routing, which almost had us laughing, shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It was a very special situation which the software had problems getting a handle on — the whole thing was based on GRIB files with a fairly weak percentage of confidence involved.
“But I suppose it goes some way to showing what we could be in store for at the end of the week.” Riou concluded.
With 1,400 nm still to go on Leg 4 the leading boats are currently expected to reach Auckland on the morning of March 10.kedown.”
05/03/2012 13:02:59 UTC
DTL DTLC BS DTF
1 GPMA 0.00 0 11.3 1372.3
2 PUMA 70.10 16 7.3 1442.4
3 TELE 114.60 8 8.9 1486.9
4 ADOR 151.50 4 10.2 1523.8
5 CMPR 151.70 10 9.5 1524.0
6 SNYA 235.00 3 11.7 1607.3
