Vendée Globe Race - Day 19: Lead change - front three having a match race
by Richard Gladwell, Sail-World NZ 29 Nov 2024 16:53 PST
24 November 2024
Sebastien Simon - Groupe Dubreuil - Vendée Globe 2024 - November 26, 2024 © Sebastien Simon
There has been a nominal lead change at the head of the Vendée Globe 2024 Race fleet as the three front runners clear the Cape of Good Hope and get into the Southern Ocean. However the Predictwind weather routing is also calling a near dead-heat.
Sébastien Simon (FRA) on Groupe Dubreuil is shown on the official tracker as holding a lead of .66nm over former race leader, Charlie Dalin (FRA) onboard MACIF Santé Prévoyance, with Yoann Richomme (FRA) Paprec Arkea showing as being 5nm astern of Simon on the official Race Tracker, which calculates the distance left by each boat to sail to the finish in Les Sables d'Olonne
There have been some changes in the predicted outcomes for the lead boats, which will require careful positioning for the next section of the 24,400nm non-stop singlehanded race around the world. The now 39 boat fleet of IMOCA60s has been sailing for 19 days.
In the image above the course options are relatively straight forward for a day, then there have to be some big decisions made as to whether to head north, and pick up an area of low pressure, or to stay south, with a shorter distance to sail.
A low pressure cell, which offered some excellent record breaking opportunities is now shown as being slightly weaker and dives south. However there is still good high speed mileage on offer, between 1900hrs UTC on Dec 3 to 1730hrs UTC on Dec 6 - for Charlie Dalin, who we believe has the fastest boat of the three.
For the performance prediction purposes, in the image above, we've moved the virtual end point to the eastern corner of the exclusion zone of the Ice Gate, approximately due south of Cape Leewin, and at the point where the gate moves south to allow competitors to get around the bottom end of New Zealand and Cape Horn.
That point is about 8020nm distant from the lead boats' current position in the Southern Indian Ocean - and predicted to take both Dalin and Simon 9days 17hrs and Richomme and hour longer using the ECMWF data feed, in Predictwind.