Within the next week, the Whitbread Round the World Race reaches its halfway point when the nine-boat fleet arrives in the City of Sails, Auckland, current home of the America's Cup.
Sunday's restart at 2.0 a.m. (Irish time) sees the crews facing into an expected five-day leg, the second of three `sprint' stages which will still be one of the most tiring as few boats will run a regular watch-system, opting for keeping as much crew weight on the rail for most of the 1,250 miles.
As is becoming the norm in this race, weather and navigators' interpretation of meteorological information is becoming the determining factor in any yacht's fortunes. Across a short distance such as this fourth leg, the smallest error will certainly cost places and points accordingly.
However, the expected enthusiastic welcome the local Kiwis give the fleet this year is likely to be tempered by a smaller number of home-skippered entries. None of the current top three in the race have Kiwi skippers compared to the 1993/94 event where the three first boats in were home teams.
America's Cup veteran Paul Cayard holds a growing lead and if he and the crew of EF Language can add a third leg win to their scorecard, they will be well-poised for a less-pressurised southern ocean voyage in the toughest stage of the race in leg five from Auckland to Sao Sebastiao in Brazil in one month's time.
With two more Scandinavian entries holding the runner-up places, a pecking order for the race might seem to be emerging. However, both second place Innovation Kvaerner (Knut Frodstad) and Swedish Match (Gunnar Krantz) both sustained serious mast damage en route to Sydney, although the relatively light conditions still allowed them to deliver podium results before Christmas.
But the damage still highlights the precarious nature of Whitbread racing. Many will recall Chris Dickson's entry Tokio in the last race that had a seemingly unbeatable overall lead, only to be dismasted in the penultimate leg off Brazil, thereby surrendering the overall win to Ross Field on Yamaha.
Replacing the old accumulated time basis for the race with the points-per-leg system introduced for 1997/98 has ensured that that shouldn't happen again. Now, a leading boat can suffer a poor leg or possibly even two and still retain a chance at an overall win. Such hope is still on offer to Lawrie Smith and the crew of Silk Cut who plummeted from third overall to sixth in what race crews have euphemistically dubbed the "hero to zero" syndrome.
Watch-leader Gordon Maguire maintains that the fleet hasn't had any proper racing yet and that the fastest boats aren't winning and it is just a matter of time before this is turned around. "The race so far isn't what we expected", he told The Irish Times on New Year's Day. "The present classification speaks volumes for the quality of the fleet when the three pre-race favourites are now fourth, sixth and seventh."
