KOCHI: The Volvo Ocean Race (VOR), the ocean marathon, will begin its second leg today to Kochi from Cape Town on a 4,450-mile voyage of discovery.
This is the first time that the race, first staged in 1973, has departed from its rampaging route through the Southern Ocean to take in three stops in Asia -Singapore and Qingdao, the Olympic sailing venue in China, being the other two.
In the wake of threats from pirates, organizers have made major changes in the route structure.
“As it stands, the areas of most concern are the waters off the coast of Somalia, the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca, the stretch of water between west Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra that will come into play on leg three,” a statement from the international organizers of the race said.
To tackle the threat, the Race Committee has added a Leg 2 scoring waypoint below Mauritius and an exclusion zone above to keep the fleet east and away from Somalia , where a Philippines chemical tanker with 23 crewmembers was hijacked Monday.
According to the International Maritime Bureau, of the 199 recorded acts of piracy worldwide in the first nine months of the year 63 occurred in the waters off Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden.
The fleet will make use of the UK Maritime Trade Organization (UKMTO) based in Dubai. The positions of the boats will be passed to UKMTO every three hours and they will be fed into a database passed out to warships that will know where all of them are. Likewise, the race has retained the services of Control Risks and Dryad, who cover risk assessment and maritime intelligence respectively. The 4,450-mile Leg 2 of the race begins the new route in Asia for the circumnavigation for the first time in its history of 35 years. Never before has the fleet transited the Indian Ocean northbound and Kochi is its lone Indian stopover.
Authorities expect half a million people, both Indian and foreign, to visit Queen of the Arabian Sea during ten days from Dec. 3 when the world’s best racing yachts will lay anchored here.
In past races the fleet has covered the Indian Ocean in the lower latitudes, surfing wildly along the Roaring Forties, Frothing Fifties and Screaming Sixties (the degrees of latitude) on strong westerly winds bound for Australia or New Zealand. However, according to officials, the fleet may this time initially use those westerly winds to make some easting, but then it will make a hard left turn northward to the finish port of Kochi.
The Kochi leg is important for the fleet because there is a scoring gate, which will award four points to the first boat to pass, 3.5 to second, three to third and so on. The fleet simply has to cross the line of longitude to collect the points.
The sailing marathon was kicked off in the Swedish of Alicante Saturday last month with eight yachts representing seven nations. The 88 crewmen are to sail 68,500 kilometres against punishing conditions with little sleep and living on dried food. On Dec. 13, the teams will sail to Singapore from here followed by Qingdao (China), around Cape Horn to Rio de Janeiro , Boston , Galway ( Ireland ), Gothenburg, Stockholm and the finishing point of St Petersburg.
The racing teams include Sweden’s Ericsson International, Spain’s Telefonica Black and Telefonica Blue, Team Russia, US entry Puma Ocean Racing, the Sino-Irish Green Dragon and Team Delta Lloyd from the Netherlands.
