There are no winners

With the wind still lacking, the irony of the slowest opening leg ever is starting to sink in on the Volvo Ocean Race crews

The most striking thing about the current position reports coming from the Volvo Ocean Race is the difference in speed between the boats. The speeds from the onboard position fixing equipment vary from as much as nearly nine knots down to not much more than two. And yet no one boat seems to be able to break away. How can this be?

The answer is simple. The speed reports are updated every ten minutes and each and every boat is taking their turn in a never ending battle of hurry up and hang around. First one get a puff and pulls ahead and then another makes a break. None it seems can sustain any real speed for long. The net result is that the leading group of five are all confined to a small patch of ocean, non more than 12 miles in front of any other.

The exceptions could perhaps be the three boats who have fallen behind. Slightly more consistent breeze has allowed them to find some semblance of constant speed and the gap between SEB, Amer Sports Too, djuice and the rest of the pack has closed markedly.

E-mail messages from the boats prove a great guide to the mixed emotions running through the fleet. On the one hand no body can quite believe how close the racing is after 12 days at sea. On the other the physical and mental strain of gaining inches, yards and miles is clearly beginning to show. To cap it all, some are starting to talk of a 35 to 40 day leg, the longest ever first leg of an Ocean Race and more significantly, some eight to ten days outside the food allowance carried by most boats. Frustration it seems could soon be mixed with hunger.

And no matter how hard one looks at the weather forecasts, there seems to be no end in sight. "When I look out now to the future, I still see the doldrums, the South Atlantic high and the prospect of a time between 35 and 40 days now," says Grant Dalton from aboard Amer Sports One. "For us this would be bad, no time to recover before the start with the lateness of the programme, and no time in Cape Town either."