Thursday, February 23, 2006

Slowly does it

Its a hard slog for the boats on Leg 4 of the Volvo Ocean race as they make their way to the ice gate. The race organisers have located it in the part of the southern Pacific where not only is there little wind but erratic and unpredictable wind at that.

To make it even more fun there's a storm brewing about to roar in with 50 knot winds and 30 foot waves. So they really really want to get through that gate so they can head off to Cape Horn. But Moose and the boys on Black Betty are currently heading west of north. What is pretty gutting is they could easily make a nice easterly course from where they are.

They're at 50S but there's just 5 knots of wind. If that keeps up, with 4 degrees of latitude to go it might take them a day to get to the gate under current conditions.

I'm sure they can't get out of there quickly enough.

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