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Jules Verne Trophy weather
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| by Sylvain Mondon |
| Weather expert ashore, Sylvain Mondon has exercised his science of routing at Météo France since 1993. |
The week's weather round-up - The seventh week at sea
the seventh... and the last weekGroupama 3 began her last week in ENE'ly tradwinds establishing at 14/18 knots. As such, with wind on the beam or upwind full
and by the giant trimaran rapidly picked up the pace. Speeds in excess of 30 knots were par for the course once again as they
made headway towards the West of the Azores High. This rapid approach phase proved favourable for the final session of rest
for the week on Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th March, as overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday, their passage across the ridge
of high pressure was set to be tricky. During this period, their deficit in relation to Orange shrunk very quickly and was
soon transformed into a lead.
This line of light winds extending out to the SW of the Azores High was the final big
obstacle of this round the world course, but it couldn't be overlooked. In fact, though the disturbed SW'ly air flow anticipated
further to the North a number of days earlier was very much in evidence, it was necessary to take care to enter the system
properly and above all without losing any time. Indeed the SW'ly air flow became established at the start of the week, but
was only set to last until Saturday. As a result it was essential to exploit the successive fronts circulating between North
America and France as best they could.
After using the W to SW'ly winds produced by the two main fronts to reach
the Azores archipelago, Franck Cammas and his crew were overtaken by the last front from the disturbed system shortly before
entering the Bay of Biscay. As such they completed the course in a NW'ly wind of around twenty knots on a rather favourable
sea conducive to speeds of between 30 and 35 knots.
The very high speeds reached since crossing the ridge of high
pressure in the middle of the week enabled Groupama 3 to stretch out their lead to nearly 1,500 miles over the previous record
holder, Orange II. As such, despite conditions which were only rarely very favourable, Groupama 3 set a new round the world
crewed record of 48 days 07 hours 44 minutes, improving on the former record time by over 2 days.
Congratulations
to Franck, Lionel, Thomas, Jacques, Frédéric, Stève, Bruno, Ronan, Loick and Stan.
Sylvain
Mondon
Meteorological Engineer
Marine weather forecaster
Météo-France
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