Global Ocean Race - Into the darkness for Class40s Cessna Citation and Financial Crisis

After 15 days at sea in Leg 1 of the double-handed Global Ocean Race (GOR) the Class40s are straddling the Doldrums with the fleet leaders approximately 200 miles north of the Equator and sailing over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. While Cessna Citation in third place and Financial Crisis in fourth are locked into the exhausting and potentially boat-damaging cycle of squalls and calms, the fleet leaders, Campagne de France and BSL, found the Doldrum’s exit and relatively stable south-easterly breeze early on Tuesday morning. Phesheya-Racing and Sec. Hayai – north of the leaders and taking the most western approach to the Doldrums – continue to make the best speeds in the fleet as their final miles in the North East Trades arrive.

On Monday evening, 26 year-old Hugo Ramon could already see evidence of the Doldrums crackling and hissing just over the horizon: “Yesterday we began to see lightning very far away,” he reported from Cessna Citation. “I feel a bit like Frodo Baggins contemplating Mordor in the distance. I know we have to enter into the realm of darkness and there is absolutely no going back.” Overnight, Ramon and co-skipper, Conrad Colman, sailed straight into Middle Earth with speeds dropping to sub-six knots as Marco Nannini and Paul Peggs on Financial Crisis piled down from the north averaging nine knots and taking 20 miles from the lead held by Cessna Citation.

 

By daybreak on Monday, both the Class40s were locked in the Doldrums with speed averages fluctuating from two to five knots. Conrad Colman had spotted the first towering wall of stacked cumulonimbus clouds on the previous evening: “These are so large that they can be individually picked out on our satellite images as they develop so much thunderous energy surging vertically through different layers,” he reported at midday on Monday. “These clouds rule our world completely and the towers of power can flip the wind 180 degrees and quadruple its intensity in an instant.” The immense and rapidly rising columns of air heated by warm seawater build the cloud stacks with the air eventually cooled at high altitude: “Rain starts to fall and soon all that vertical energy is going the other way. Droplets of rain push the air down which then splays out in all directions, like a jet of water on a spoon when it hits the ocean.”

The trick in the Doldrums is to evaluate which part of the vertical cycle a cumulus cloud is occupying and whether it is a ‘growing’ or ‘crushing’ cloud: “As the growing cloud sucks air into its centre, the tactic is to pass to windward as its suction will augment the prevailing winds and your speed,” Colman explains. “As a crushing cloud blows out in all directions, you need to be on the other side of the cloud, relative to the wind, in order to get the boost. Confuse a growing cloud with a crushing cloud at your peril as to pass on the wrong side means to be completely becalmed.”