Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => The Sporting Life => Topic started by: drgannet on 08 November, 2020, 09:37:15 pm
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They're off!
Now that the Vuelta has finished, there is the prospect of two and a half months of dot watching.
https://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/tracking-map (https://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/tracking-map)
Sam Davies made a good start, but there are 4 French boats building an early lead.
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Its going to take a few days to understand who has found some speed.
Alex Thompson is listed as the favourite but its good to see so many British skippers.
We should have been in the start village as we have been for the last four editions but COVID put a stop to our trip.
I know its wrong but what I find fascinating about ocean racing is the way 'luck' plays such a part, gear breakage, hitting something, lack of sleep, storms and all the other things that the skipper has to deal with in addition to sailing the boat.
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Really looking forward to following this.
It is possible to 'make' a lot of your own luck with careful preparation, but you're right, there are some events which are utterly unpredictable and over which it is impossible to have any control.
It's telling that Alex Thomson has finished (I think) 4th, 3rd and 2nd in the last three races.
Clearly, chucking a shed load of cash at the problem is quite a help !!
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AT still in the lead, just. Be interesting to see how they negotiate the Sth Atlantic high.
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Bugger. https://www.alexthomsonracing.com/blog/2020/11/22/team-update/
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They're all being engulfed by high pressure/low winds now it seems...
Good to see things are progressing well for AT.
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I don’t think I would want to be sanding and bonding carbon sheets in the bow like AT has been.
I think he is starting to get back up to speed and luckily only lost a few hundred miles.
I dread to think what he would have done if the damage had occurred in the Southern Ocean.
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Rudder problem doesn't sound good for AT's chances. Unless it turns out to be debris or summat which detaches.
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AT is out because of the rudder damage.
He has got a seven day trip to Cape Town ahead of him.
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Poor bastard. That must be soul destroying after all the heartache of the structural repair.
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Bit surprised boats don't carry a spare rudder, as so open to damage.
Meanwhile Dalin has really benefitted from catching favourable winds.
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Yes, you'd have thought a spare was doable - this image from AT's 2016/17 HB.
ETA S'pose the whole mounting assembly could have been damaged...
(https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/inspirewp/live/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2016/09/IMG_1907.jpg)
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Given AT's demonstrable determination, if it had been fixable with what is on board he would have tried.
I would be slightly surprised if they didn't have a spare rudder on board (or even two if they are handed).
Given that his last stab at this race was blighted by a foil which hit something the prospect of a damaged rudder must surely have featured in their planning
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It is notable how many of the top boats have had mechanical issues early in the race. I wonder whether the designers have pushed the boundaries a little too much?
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Twas always thus. Think high aspect ratio rudders and the '79 Fastnet.
Invent a rule, and people will (not unreasonably) design to the rule.
Remember 'The Race' in 2000 ? (Where interestingly there were no design rules at all.) One designer at the time was quoted as saying "The boat that is unbreakable will not win this race."
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Although in the London-Sydney Marathon of 1968, Andrew Cowan went to the chaps at Rootes and said “build me a car that'll finish last”. He won. In a Hillman Hunter.
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Although in the London-Sydney Marathon of 1968, Andrew Cowan went to the chaps at Rootes and said “build me a car that'll finish last”. He won. In a Hillman Hunter.
:-)
I went to the start of that.
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Rudder aside, presumably the nautical engineers 'signed off' on AT's original spec 2020 boat thinking it was ocean robust/ safe & ready to potentially win the VG. In reality the carbon frame required repair & 'bodging' before even getting to the Southern ocean. I guess the jury's still out as to whether AT's carbon grafting would have done the trick over weeks in the SO. We won't know.
He looked gutted in the most recent video.
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Earlier today, Kevin Escoffier reported that he was taking on water, activated his distress beacon and abandoned his boat.
Jean le Cam immediately diverted and arrived several hours later. He reported establishing visual and audio contact with Escoffier in his life raft. Unfortunately 5m seas prevented a rescue attempt and contact was lost.
Three other skippers have diverted and are now in the area ready to start a coordinated search at sunrise.
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That's a different level of 'bugger'. Fingers very crossed.
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Escoffier is now aboard Yes We Cam.
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Good report on the website https://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news/20697/escoffier-s-rescue-mission-accomplished-yes-he-did (https://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news/20697/escoffier-s-rescue-mission-accomplished-yes-he-did)
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his boat nosedived into a wave and, he reported after his rescue, literally broke in two, giving him minutes to grab his survival suit and take to his liferaft.
:o
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"Reported to be taking on water." Yup I guess that would be one consequence of having your craft split in two.
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Bloody hell.
“You see the images of shipwrecks? It was like that, but worse. In four seconds the boat nosedived, the bow folded at 90°. I put my head down in the cockpit, a wave was coming. I had time to send one text before the wave fried the electronics. It was completely crazy. It folded the boat in two. I’ve seen a lot before but this one…” (https://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news/20697/escoffier-s-rescue-mission-accomplished-yes-he-did)
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Translation: the front fell off :demon:
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Holy moly. That story is something, and then at the end, there's this little snippet:
This amazing rescue reverses roles played out between 5th and 6th January 2009, during the 2008-2009 Vendée Globe. Vincent Riou, the then the skipper of PRB, rescued Jean Le Cam from his upturned IMOCA 60 which had capsized 200 miles west of Cape Horn. Le Cam was trapped inside his upturned VM Materiaux for 16 hours during which time it was not known for certain if Le Cam was safe inside his boat or not.
:o
Edit - I've just looked at the boat. That's more F1 than F1! The forces of a 60ft hydrofoil hitting a wave at 30 knots must be epic.
(pictures here: https://www.sail-world.com/news/233537/Kevin-Escoffier-(PRB)-activates-Distress-Beacon )
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It doesn't always work out so well - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Roufs
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Edit - I've just looked at the boat. That's more F1 than F1! The forces of a 60ft hydrofoil hitting a wave at 30 knots must be epic.
(pictures here: https://www.sail-world.com/news/233537/Kevin-Escoffier-(PRB)-activates-Distress-Beacon )
I would say they are more like Le Mans prototypes. F1 has a far more sophisticated development and manufacturing programme and is more sanitised than it was in terms of the race mechanics working on the bleeding edge.
Tour the garages at Le Mans and it will still be pretty routine for someone to take a hacksaw to three hundred grands worth of bodywork realise it was a mistake and then race it with a gaffa tape repair.
I read recently how formidably difficult it was to do a structural analysis of these boats - the ocean environment never being constant, the boat never having consistent points of support which can be considered when applying calculations of the forces generated across the rigging points and foils - it was mind bending even in comparison to something mad like an F1 clutch or the Bloodhound drive train.
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Escoffier comes across remarkably calm after the event. Being in a life raft in any kind of sea is a grim experience, let alone a 5m swell 1000 miles from land in the dark.
There are some nice (mainly promotional) videos on youtube of the newest boats in testing over the last year. Most boats in this race competed in the Vendee Arctique in July, but the Southern Ocean is reportedly a different place alltogether. Interesting that Thompson's boat suffered a similar partial failure in the North Atlantic storm on the way down and may well not have survived so well later on had he continued.
I can highly recommend Pete Goss's book 'Close to the wind' for the description of his rescue of Raphael Dinelli in the 1996 version.
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Escoffier comes across remarkably calm after the event. Being in a life raft in any kind of sea is a grim experience, let alone a 5m swell 1000 miles from land in the dark.
There are some nice (mainly promotional) videos on youtube of the newest boats in testing over the last year. Most boats in this race competed in the Vendee Arctique in July, but the Southern Ocean is reportedly a different place alltogether. Interesting that Thompson's boat suffered a similar partial failure in the North Atlantic storm on the way down and may well not have survived so well later on had he continued.
I can highly recommend Pete Goss's book 'Close to the wind' for the description of his rescue of Raphael Dinelli in the 1996 version.
That's a great read. Very inspiring.
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Alex Thomson was suitably upbeat about having his boat fail before he got below 40°S (as in, it gave him a chance to fix it whilst it wasn't too rough).
If that had been me I'd have been crapping it on the grounds it had failed before things got rough.
Remember Pete Goss's boat for The Race. It fell apart in a N Atlantic Winter storm on a test sail and they had to abandon it.
That was after one of its bows had fallen off on an earlier shakedown run.
Turned out that the designer hadn't allowed for buckling loads (Euler, something about a dimension ^12 IIRC).
Insignificant in smaller hulls, but as the size increases, buckling failure modes begin to dominate, and because the designer had never worked at this size before he/she simply failed to consider the possibility of buckling.
Given that these craft are permanently pushing the boundaries is so many areas, every single one of those looneys is far far braver then me.
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The kind of thing which happened to Escoffier's boat can't be conducive for the skippers having a bit of shuteye in the middle of the southern ocean night...
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Anyone who's in a boat of a similar age from the same designer would possibly be considering throttling back a bit I would think.
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Sam Davies looks to have turned left for Cape Town, and is going relatively slowly. Can't find anything about her with a cursory Google search though.
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Think she hit something in the water but I can’t find a link.
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Bugger.
Premières nouvelles de Sam après son avarie. Elle revient sur le choc violent que son bateau a subi la nuit dernière. Sam va bien, elle inspecte son bateau pour évaluer les dégâts.
From https://live.initiatives-coeur.fr/vendee-globe/2020/interventions/1773
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Sebastian Simon also hit something last night and his boat Arkea has suffered significant foil damage. Sadly sounds like both will end up retiring (TBD but what is reported so far does not sound promising).
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Certainly looks like he's heading for CT too.
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I wonder if what they're hitting is whales.
No engine noise, 25 kts, nasty sharp sticky out bits, whale numbers going up globally, I can easily see how a whale on the surface could easily be caught napping. They will not have encountered this kind of threat before.
Also, based on Alex Thomson's vids he spends virtually no time on deck looking where he's going and the computer does all the steering, so it is like a very long odds version of Russian roulette (for the boat and the whale).
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Or containers?
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Or containers?
That's the other obvious possibility, though I would think that if you hit one of those you'd end up with a hole in the hull.
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This is building to quite a climax. 1500nm to go and the first four boats have less than 100nm between them.
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And the boat currently running third, 57.4 nm behind the leader, has a six hour bonus waiting for him when he crosses the line due to the time he spent helping in the rescue of Escoffier SW of the Cape of Good Hope.
At 15kn that puts him in the lead.
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The mayor of Les Sables d'Olonne is hopping mad that the prefect won't allow spectators at the finish.
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Ooo, I can imagine he'd be a little upset at that.
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Clearly, "nm" in this context are Nautical Miles. However my brain initially offered me "nanometers"... that would be a close race!
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Well, who do you reckon has it?
Very hard to know what the wind will do, but I will boldy predict the first non-French win and go for Boris Herrmann.
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Hmmm. There's no big change in weather due in the next couple of days, and Herrman is about six hours behind the leader on the water (which with his time bonus would put them about level).
Too close for me to call now. If I were to put a bet on I'd go for Apivia/Dalin (current leader) to just hold on.
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Looks like it is going to be Dalin by a whisker. Exciting stuff.
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Boris needs to gybe, NOW !
He's dropped away quite a bit.
Incredible stuff that they are this close after 27,000 nm.
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Phew! He's gybed.
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I like what has been setup for the finish
https://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news/21984/last-gybe-for-charlie-dalin (https://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news/21984/last-gybe-for-charlie-dalin)
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Very cool. Nail biting finish.
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Herrmann has hit a fishing boat! You couldn't make it up...
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Looks like Bestaven might just do it. 125 NM to go in 8 hrs 50 mins. Currently making 18 knots...
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Herrmann has hit a fishing boat! You couldn't make it up...
Noooooooo !
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Looks like Bestaven with about a one hour margin.