Who will win leg 2?

James Boyd looks at the form for the Volvo Ocean Race's first Southern Ocean leg

Leg two of the Volvo Ocean Race kicks off today and once again will provide some hot competition between the eight boats, this time in the arena of the Southern Ocean.

For this race the course has changed slightly. Although it still runs from Cape Town to Sydney (Fremantle was binned for the last race) there is an additional waypoint off Eclipse island, near Albany in Western Australia.

The reason for the waypoint is that in the BOC Challenge seven years ago and the subsequent Vendee Globe several skippers such as Isabelle Autissier, Tony Bullimore and Thierry Dubois ran into major trouble forcing the authorities in Australia to mount rescue missions.

These were highly complex and costly simply because the boats were so far offshore at the time. As a result today all races running to the south of Australia now attempt to keep their boats closer to the coast.

Leg one south to Cape Town should have been a relatively light wind trip, but for many of the boats it turned out to be a lengthy upwind slog. Leg two should be very different again with a race to get south into the strong westerly winds to be found in the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties.

Many Southern Ocean regulars say that the 'Indian Ocean' part of the Southern Ocean is far worse than the Pacific part they will experience on leg 4, because the depressions tend to be more intense and faster moving. This can create very unpleasant, and often dangerous cross seas. There is also the possibility of the boats encountering icebergs in the early stages of this leg.

As the boats close on Australia conditions will get lighter as they fall under the effect of the high pressure system of the Australian Bight and so after rounding Eclipse Island they are likely to dive south again in search of fresh breeze. As a final test the boats must then sail through the Bass Strait and then north up to Sydney, an area of notoriously volatile weather and where the boats may well be hard on the wind again.

But the bulk of the sailing on this 6,550 miles long leg will be the heavy air downwind and blast reaching conditions of the Southern Ocean and this may well bring out the performance of some boats that failed to shine on leg one.

One of the excitements of the Volvo Ocean Race is that the competition is so close. Boats are well prepared, their crews are highly experienced and the outcome of the leg will be down to playing the weather right, being lucky with the weather (as Mr Dalton was on leg one) and not creating downtime through cock ups.

While it is likely that illbruck will win and Amer Sports Too will come last the real problem is in predicting what will happen between second and seventh. So here is what I think the finishing order will be for leg 2 and on the subsequent pages I will explain why:

illbruck
Team Tyco
News Corp
Amer Sports One
Assa Abloy
djuice
SEB
Amer Sports Too