On the second day of racing of this Vendée Globe 2020, we can say that the weather conditions that the skippers will experience on the descent towards the Doldrums will be particularly tough. After leaving in lousy weather, a first not very active cold front passed without incident, the loners will cross a second, much more violent front during the night and morning from Tuesday to Wednesday, for the group going to the West, and in the evening for the group passed between the DST (¹) and la in French.
But these future conditions are very different for Virtual Regatta players and for sailors…
Satellite analysis of the 10 November 00:00 UTC by SailGrib
What makes the big difference between solo sailors and players is that Virtual Regatta does not take into account, nor the state of the sea, nor the currents. This already partly explains the gap between the group of players and that of sailors on D+2.
The group of players (yellow circle) and that of the solitary (red circle) on D+2
Concerning routing, even when using the same GFS 1° weather models for racing and for gaming, The performance of the racers is inevitably impacted by the state of the sea, surface currents due to wind, and to a lesser extent ocean currents. And this sea state will be particularly hard to negotiate in the coming hours (²).
Sea state after the passage of the front, FNMOC WW3 forecast for Wednesday 11
This also explains why, with velocity polars, Regular players will still be able to stay at 100% efficiency of the fleece integrated into Virtual Regatta, without worrying about the waves that don't reach our screens. But the same will certainly not be true for browsers. On the one hand, because they will have to leave the theoretical routings for many reasons : Saving equipment, minimize dangerous manoeuvres such as gybing in heavy seas, Optimize their trajectories, etc, and on the other hand, managing the race in the long term, This requires managing risk-taking.
After this first hurdle to overcome, another even more dangerous one awaits them. To be continued…
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(¹) Dispositive of SSeparation of TRafik (Absolute exclusion zone for runners)
(²) see Yann Amice's detailed analysis this Tuesday on the West France page of the Vendée Globe.
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