Torben Grael's Ericsson 4 is beginning to tear itself away from the rest of the fleet. In leg one, the team did this by setting a new 24-hour record in gale force winds. Here, the team is showing they can move well in the light stuff too. Over the past 24 hours, their lead over teammates Ericsson 3 has increased from 5 to 57 nautical miles on the 04:00 GMT position report, but while Ericsson 4 is adding miles to their lead, they do appear to still be in the clutches of the Doldrums. Wind speed, as reported in the Race Data Centre, is still just 6.3 knots.

Behind the leader, Ericsson 3, Green Dragon, Delta Lloyd and Puma are tightly bunched, with just 25 miles separating the four boats. Ericsson 3 is furthest to the east, Delta Lloyd slightly to the west, but all four are essentially sailing in the same patch of water. Any movement here will be due to coaxing more speed out of the boat in the tough conditions, or being favoured with a spot of luck in the form of a very localised squall system that pushes up the wind speed for a few minutes.

Moving up fast

Delta Lloyd has been the big winner among this group over the past 24 hours: "It was an awesome day," confirmed navigator Matt Gregory. "we've made massive gains on the entire fleet...Today was a day of sailing in and out of rain squalls and an uncountable number of sail changes to quickly adapt to the changing conditions."

Whatever they've done seems to have worked. For example, they've gone from trailing Green Dragon by 59 miles yesterday morning to being 8 miles back as dawn breaks today. And they've simply sailed around the west of Puma, to make the pass.

There are a few wild cards left to be played however. Way out to the west is Telefonica Blue and further behind them, Telefonica Black. Bouwe Bekking's boys on Blue are best positioned to perhaps sneak around the left side of the fleet. The predicted positions running on the leaderboard on the homepage have them doing just that, finishing as high as third place in the leg. It looks like a harder road for Telefonica Black.

And out to the east, on the opposite side of the race course, is Team Russia. Andreas Hanakamp and his men opted to head east a couple of days ago, sacrificing miles in the hope they would gain them back through a swifter passage through the Doldrums. To this point, it isn't happening, and according to the predicted positions, it isn't likely to.

But with 800 miles of tricky conditions left before the finish line in Cochin, there's still plenty of sailing left.

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Last Updated ( Thursday, 27 November 2008 )