Competition in Ocean Sailing Races

 It is a busy time for Ocean Sailors, even for Virtual Ocean Sailors.

The VolvoOceanRace has started some weeks back and only sailing in Leg 1 towards Cape Town and another historical Ocean Sailing Race is starting.

The historical Route du Rhum is starting on Sunday 2nd November 2014 at 1300 GMT from Pointe du Grouin, France.  The Finish is location in the Caribbean on Guadeloupe.


For Virtual Sailors it will be a real competition as well, as also the Route du Rhum has a virtual sailing player to sail alongside your favorite Real Sailors. You can compete with the best sailors in the Route du Rhum by following their tracks, or if you feel confident you may pass your favorites and beat them to the Finish in Guadeloupe. 

This will be a real competition for the VORG player, as this LiveSkipper player is coming with more modern features, better navigational tools, a higher accuracy to set your course and apart from the Ultime race in the Trimaran, it is completely free; inclusive multiple sails, auto-heading, Waypoints and .............a good scheduler. A detailed LiveSkipper wiki is a good help, if you would get lost or when you want to optimize your sailing skills.

Virtual Sailing Route du Rhum

And the competition goes on. 

The Route du Rhum is sailed by different types of Boat, contrary to the VolvoOceanRace, where this year for the first time all Boats are identical, the OneDesign VO65; see the details under TAB BOAT in the top of my blog.

The attractive part for virtual sailors is, that in Route du Rhum virtual player, you have a choose from 3 boats, monohulls, Class 40 and Imoca60 and the super fast Maxi XXL Trimaran. So if you are interested (and can find the time ) you may compete with yourself in 3 different boat-types all sailing the Route du Rhum sailing race, alongside the fleet of Real Boats in the Route du Rhum.

To follow the race you can look at the website of Route du Rhum.

Route du Rhum website

OK, now over to the VolvoOceanRace, where also a fierce competition is fought by the 3 leaders in the VOR fleet. Vestas Wind, sailed a more westerly course over the last days and now it shows that it has paid out: Vestas is within a Nm of both Abu Dhabi and Brunel, this morning report tells.
It is amazing that after sailing for almost 2 weeks ,  almost half the fleet is with some 2Nm of each other.

The St.Helena High is growing and moving more South, this may have surprised Brunel and AbuDhabi but somewhere Vestas Wind had a good feeling and now closed the gap that existed since the Cape Verde Islands. 

This will become a very interesting final to the Finish in Cape Town.