Racing or Cruising?

Are Amer Sports Too taking it easy and staying safe asks Peter Bentley.

"We're fine and happy that we are back in contact with everyone. We have had a tough couple of weeks, but we're still racing," reported Lisa McDonald (pictured right) late last week when the satellite phone aboard Amer Sports Too finally came back into range.

McDonald conceded that Amer Sports Too had incurred a lot of minor, and time consuming, gear failures in the Southern Ocean, but does this alone account for their relatively poor performance? Sure, the all-female crew has caught up a bundle in the past 48 hours but that is nothing to do with how fast the boat is or how hard it is being driven; it's simply down to there being more wind at the back of the fleet.

So are they really racing hard? Messages and the images coming from the boat seem to indicate that the pedal is not quite so far down to the metal on Amer Sports Too as it is on the other boats.

"Snow was a bit of a surprise," wrote Liz Wardley on the 22nd November. "I have never been in the snow before and really didn't expect to see it during a yacht race, I was that excited I was straight up on deck with thermals and bare feet hoping to build a snow man on the foredeck. Not quite enough falling out of the sky so had to resort to throwing snowballs at the watch leader instead." Is this serious racing?

A look at the performance data provided by Pilot Fish on the Volvo Ocean Race Website, makes interesting viewing too. Up to about 15 knots of breeze Amer Sports Too appears to be one of the quicker boats in the fleet. In 20 knots and above, the data seems to show that the boat is either slow, or not being pushed that hard. Perhaps even more interestingly, interior temperature reported from the boat (accessible from Virtual Spectator) has shown consistently higher values than on any other boat.