| Velux 5 Oceans: Mike Golding & Ecover sailing upwind in 16 knots of breeze |
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| Tuesday, 14 November 2006 | |
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Coralie Rassinoux: As expected, and widely predicted, Mike Golding on ECOVER has been losing miles to Bernard Stamm, the race leader on the Velux 5 Oceans race. While some kind of glitch in the method of calculating the mileages between the boats provided by the race organisers has just been eliminated, the net result is that an almost impossible haemorrhaging of miles has suddenly appeared over the last 24 hours. The sad reality is that ECOVER is now some 446 miles behind Stamm, with Kojiro Shiraishi 75 miles behind and Alex Thomson, who is heading west around the high pressure system, now 419 miles away from Mike. Mike is to the west and now has about 350 miles of lateral separation from Bernard, but this afternoon he was in slightly better mood after having sorted out some issues with his autopilot and was sailing upwind in 16 knots of breeze. But he concedes that at the moment, the routing shows Alex Thomson possibly getting past him despite him sailing a much greater distance around the west of the high pressure system. “It is not too bad at the moment,” Mike told us this afternoon, “We are trucking south. It is steady going but the wind is steadily decreasing and I am just desperately trying to beat the weather files at the moment.” “It is clear to me that Bernard is marching out the other side of this further. He has maybe a bit more stop-start to do, so I really am going to have a bit of work to do.” “Alex might come past. That is the way it looks on the files I have at the moment, but there is not much I can do. I just hope that this is not the making or breaking of the race.” “I have 16 knots on the nose just now.” On the subject of the sudden jump in mileages he explains: “The mileage now is probably about true. I had to e-mail to Clipper Ventures to explain what was going on. They had not put the waypoints in to go around the gate.” There is a routing gate which is formed by two lateral waypoints to the south of the Cape of Good Hope which the boats must pass both to the north. “It is a bit cruel for us to see these ‘losses’ but sadly it just shows that Clipper have not been looking that closely at the positions and what has been going on.” www.mikegolding.com Velux 5 Oceans album |
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 14 November 2006 ) |
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