Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Celebrity Yacht Race - the web site

It looks like the Celebrity Yacht Race is going to beat even the 5 Oceans site for unusability.

Firstly it seems to be only compatible with web browsers running the Bulgarian version of the Oric computer. Then (as far as its possible to tell) the multi-media downloads of video, emails, podcasts etc cost a staggering Euro 995 for the period of the race.

I can see its just as well we've sent out ol' Buff to find out the real story. I'll try to convert the raw position data for kml so we can follow the race on Google Earth - watch this space.

In the meantime these are the wind forecasts from this excellent site. You can see the boats are going to have a slow start, drifting across the line at Monaco rather than racing over the horizon towards Miami.

The good news is there should be some great reaching winds coming from the North-West shortly - see the figure below

So we can expect to see the fleet head out to the south of the Balearic islands to avoid the wind hole to the north.