NavList:

Your welcome Ed! Glad you enjoyed it.

Now that the fleet is one-design VOR 65s, and all boats are AIS enabled; The latest edition of the race turned into a match race around the world. By the third leg, the crews had learned they need to stay within AIS contact, which is approximatly 32+/- nautical miles. This allowed them to deploy their tactics to counter moves by the fleet. If a boat didn't stay in touch with the fleet via AIS, it wasn't long before they started loosing more ground, because they didn't know which tack to stay on with the fleet; or took a flyer and lost considerably more ground - flyers seldom pay out and four times out of five, one looses ground taking a flyer. However as shown, the rumb line isn't always the fastest route. In the future, boats taking a flyer as PUMA in the previous VOR or SANYA and BRUNEL did in the last VOR, will be rare. PUMA and BRUNEL pulled it off, by reattaching with the fleet in good position, and getting second in their respective legs. SANYA got greedy and stayed right to long, allowing the fleet to slip by to the right.

Now it will be mostly match racing tactics and rules-of-thumb such as; stay on the tack that points one closest to the next mark longer, sailing to new(stronger) wind first, cover the competition, consolidating gains by jibing or tacking in front of the fleet, when gains are made, and - Most importantly once in the lead, keep the fleet between you and the next mark, no matter what the routing is showing - as MAPFRE so disastrously displayed in the second leg.