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Displaying items by tag: Leg 0

#VOR - The last team to be confirmed for the next Volvo Ocean Race proved their 'dark horse' label all too true as they sailed to victory in Leg 0 in Alicante.

In the final significant test of the new one-design fleet's capabilities before the race proper begins next month, Team Vestas Wind surprised the more experienced contingents – besting the Dutch side Team Brunel over the line by 10 seconds.

Despite it being 'only a practice race', it's a remarkable achievement for the Danish team that was only confirmed as an entrant last month and has had just four weeks of on-the-water testing.

Meanwhile, Dongfeng Racing Team put their teamwork to the test in their dramatic scramble to retrieve their sail after it slipped into the water during stacking.

However, the primary purpose for many crews sailing on Leg 0 was getting a leg up on the competition.

As the video above demonstrates, 'learning from the enemy' was all important – especially with everyone sailing the same yacht, which means that individual team strategies will make all the difference this time out.

Published in Ocean Race

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.