Message from Cape Town

As the Portimao Global Ocean Race organisers await their fleet

It’s blowing dogs off chains here in the Tavern Of the Seas. There is a black southeaster blowing in Cape Town and the weather is grim. Dark storm clouds shroud Table Mountain and a chilly wind howls down Adderley Street, the city’s main boulevard.
This is not summer weather and it’s not even good sailing weather. If the leading boats in the Portimão Global Ocean Race were closer to Cape Town they would be getting slammed.

This, however, is small consolation for the sailors who have been at sea for almost five weeks and for whom the pull of land must be strong.

The leading boat, Beluga Racer still has over 500 miles to go and the path ahead is an obstacle course of competing weather systems.At the 15:20 UTC poll Beluga Racer was still doing battle with the abnormal high pressure system that has given Boris and Felix some heartburn over the last few days. The system has dissipated somewhat and instead of gusty headwinds, it’s no wind for the leading team.

“Today we woke up to a glassy sea,” Boris wrote in his log. “It was a relief after the last few days of hard upwind sailing but it presents another kind of problem for us to deal with.”

The ‘problem’ Boris is referring to is a ridge of light winds that Beluga Racer has to break through before finding some steadier winds on the eastern side. The 69 thousand dollar question is just how long and how slow Beluga Racer will go until they hit the new breeze, the wind that should carry them all the way into Cape Town.

While Beluga Racer deals with their set of issues, the Chileans on Desafio Cabe de Hornos are dealing with their own. They too have to transit the ridge of light winds but they will deal with it closer to Cape Town and by then the whole weather pattern may be different. Again skipper Felipe Cubillos is tight lipped about their tactics. “Once again we are not going to say much,” he wrote. “Not because we have nothing to say. Quite the contrary, however the course to Cape Town remains very tactical and the last sentence of this leg is not yet written.”

One thing that is for sure is that the red hot Chilean boat has a bone in it’s teeth and is streaking toward the finish line at 13 knots. The gap between them and Team Mowgli is still slim, but it’s growing inch by inch and now stands at 75 miles, not an insurmountable distance for Team Mowgli. They would, however, need to sail in different winds from the Chileans to beat them and their options are narrowing.

On a separate note we would like to extend our heartfelt sympathies to David Thompson's brother Alex who has had to withdraw from the Vendée Globe due to serious structural damage to his yacht Hugo Boss. Alex, one of the favorites to win the Vendée, has suffered a string of bad luck. Less than a month ago as he was approaching Les Sable d’ Olonne, the start port, he was rammed by a fishing boat resulting in a massive hole in the side of Hugo Boss. After a desperate push to ready the boat for the race he set off this past Sunday into the teeth of an early winter gale.

It’s still not clear if the damage is related to the earlier accident but Vendée rules stipulate that all boats must restart within 10 days of the original start date. There is no way that Hugo Boss will be repaired in time so the result is an end to Alex’s dream to win the big one. “We will be back in four years,” was all he had to say.