Keeping ahead of the front

New York-Barcelona record setters at high speed

After passing New York’s Ambrose Light at a little after 1430hrs (NY Time) yesterday afternoon in warm, summer-like sunshine, the two Barcelona IMOCA Open 60s Estrella Damm and W-Hotels have had a fast first night at sea, making rapid speeds towards Barcelona.

Top of the agenda for both crews in this duel across the North Atlantic - designed to set a reference time for this new 3750 miles long record passage between New York and Barcelona - is flat out speed. For the immediate future their race is not so much focussed against each other but to simply stay ahead of a cold front which is providing them with perfect wind conditions for fast, blast reaching conditions, but they need to extract every last mile from the good winds while they can.

Meteo specialists concur with co-skippers Pepe Ribes and Toño Pires in their assertions that they will have around two to two and a half days of fast reaching conditions to make hay, before the weather situation becomes less ideal.

Both of the Farr-designed sisterships have been able to maintain high average speeds in breeze which has topped 30 knots at times. After around 17 hours of sailing, they had covered around 300 miles with average boat speeds consistently in the region of 17-19 knots, increasing through the night and early morning.

Estrella Damm, with Pepe Ribes, Alex Pella and American Stan Schreyer as co-skippers, maintains the upper hand in the race, leading at the 1300 UTC poll by nearly six miles over W-Hotels’ Pachi Rivero, Toño Pires and Peter Becker (USA). For the American duo, both of whom are new to the high speed, short handed world of IMOCA Open 60 racing, the first 24 hours will have been a real eye-opener, a wet sleigh ride.

Schreyer, whose strong suit is fast inshore Olympic catamarans, has never raced far offshore and admitted that he did not really know what he was letting himself in for. But, according to round-the-world race and America’s Cup veteran Ribes, Estrella Damm’s American ocean racing rookie was acquitting himself admirably as an integral player on their rolling three hours watch system, and had even finally suppressed the adrenalin rushes to get some much needed rest.

Pepe Ribes commented: “ All is going very well. We are really quite blast reaching sailing with the wind at 100 degrees wind angle with 20-25 knots, sometimes 30 knots. We are rocketing along doing averages of 18,19, 20 knots. It is very nice sailing. At the moment Stan is doing very well. He is sleeping right now. We are in a watch system in which he is really one of us, so we have total confidence in him. We have to help him a little bit because these boats are a little bit complicated and to drive these boats at 100% needs a lot of training, and at the moment this is just the fourth day which he has been on the boat, so we are trying to help him a little bit. But, all is going well, and with Alex we have no problem, we are 100% sailing the boat just trying to reach Barcelona as soon as possible. At the moment everything is going fine, all with the boat is good and we are good. We are riding a pre-frontal wind, so we are trying to stay ahead of the cold front as much as we can, so we try to go fast at our fastest angle which is now 110 degrees, depending on the wind speed, and that is our main goal for the next two or two and a half days until the front passes. After that things a bit fickle at the moment, after the front could be northerlies but we are very close to the high pressure, so we still don’t know the plan very well, but at the moment our main goal is to sail as fast as possible to stay in front of the front.”

Toño Piris reported from W-Hotels: “ Everybody is okay on board. Pachi is resting. We are tracking along nicely. We are very glad to have Peter on board. He is learning a lot and is very motivated. I am not sure (about what the record might be) because it all depends on the high pressure system that we have to cross which will affect the record, but now all we can do is sail with best speed to stay ahead of the front. The high pressure system could make the record go a little slower.”