I’m not talking about the TV show. Instead, I’m talking about the first edition of the Barcelona World Race. Nine teams, of two professional sailors each, are in a non-stop race around the world in 60-foot yachts. The race started on November 11 in Barcelona, and now the teams have cleared the Canary Islands and have caught the trade winds and are headed towards Brazil for a while (via the dreaded doldrums).

You can find out more and keep up with all the latest news here. (RSS feed here) They have daily blog-style reports, satellite video interviews with the racers, and you can follow and review the progress of the boats in special 2D and 3D viewers. You can even sign up to race along with them in a simulation game…

The race covers some 40,000km, and is expected to take a bit less than three months. That’s right, they actually are trying to go “around the world in 80 days…” (Actually, the record on this course, in this class of boat, is 87.5 days.) The usual route for sailing around the world goes through the Suez and Panama canals. Because this is a non-stop race, they more or less have to go the “clipper route,” which passes around the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa, across the Indian Ocean, south of Tasmania, threading between New Zealand’s islands, across the Pacific, then around Chile’s Cape Horn and back up to Barcelona. There is plenty of danger from very big and heavy seas in the southern seas, not to mention floating ice.

So, who to cheer for? Knowing little about the technical aspects, the technological advantages and disadvantages of the various boats, having only read the short sailor profiles on the website, I find my heart wanting to cheer for these three teams:

• Educación sin Fronteras, featuring a Barcelona native paired up with one of only two women in the event; at 26, she’s also the youngest person in the race.
• Estrella Damm, featuring another Bcn native, a very experienced circumnavigator paired up with an American (Olympic gold medalist).
• Temenos II has a six-time circumnavigator paired with the only other woman in the race, who of course is also a very experienced sailor (they all are, obviously!). Also, this boat’s name keeps making me think: “We have two,” (i.e. sailors) because I keep misreading it as tenemos dos, although the word is actually temenos, which means something like “the domain of kings” in Greek. Oh yeah, turns out it’s also a banking software company.

Hmm. Only problem is that these three are currently…in the last three positions! Well, not all hope is lost. There’s still the all-Spanish team to cheer for: Mutua Madrileña, featuring two guys who live in the Baleares. And they’re in…well, okay…so they’re in fourth-last place. Sigh. But anything can happen, right? — there’s still about 85% of the race to go…

Seriously: Go, everybody, and have a safe race. What an adventure!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 2h16 and is filed under Spain, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.