The next leg guys.
Leg 5 - Qingdao to Rio de Janeiro
This leg is a long slog – the longest of the race at 12,300 nautical miles. At least the headsails will be in their bags for a lot of the time. The northerlies that shriek down the Yellow Sea at that time of year will quickly carry the fleet back down and into the north-east Trade Winds.
Once there, the leg strategy becomes a replica of leg one – cross the Doldrums, pick up the south-east trades, skirt the subtropical high and head south into the path of the eastbound depressions rolling across the Southern Ocean. But in comparison to the Atlantic, three factors crank the difficulty on this leg.
First, there is an awful lot more land in the way, and most of it lies in the Doldrums. The island chains that string across the Pacific from Papua New Guinea eastwards will extract a high price from anyone on the wrong side of them. Second, once the fleet is in the Southern Ocean, the Pacific is a lot bigger than the Atlantic, and it’s a long way to Cape Horn. Third, Cape Horn isn’t the finish. There are more than two thousand nautical miles to go, dodging Pamperos, the storms coming down off the Andes, then skirting the South Atlantic High and hoping the Trade Winds are set up far enough south to make it an easy finish. Or not.