Conrad Colman: Teams search for speed advantage

The quality of life on board could be the difference between winning and losing. Photo / Konrad Frost / Volvo Ocean Race

It's incredible to think that after 19 days at sea and after more than 7500 nautical miles, a lot of the Volvo Ocean Race fleet were still within sight of each other.

It's a by-product of the one-design Volvo Ocean 65s but it's also a reflection of how hard teams need to push these days.

This leg of the Volvo Ocean Race into Cape Town took 30 days in 2001-02 (it was slightly longer being out of Southampton). This time around, it took them 19 days. A race that used to be considered a marathon is now a sprint.

The conditions were certainly on their side, as they hardly slowed down through the Doldrums, but teams can't afford to slip up or take their foot off the gas.

Sailing is a sport of marginal gains. A speed difference between one boat and another of 0.1 knot over 24 hours represents 2.4 miles. Over 19 days, that's more than 45 miles — Mapfre finished in Cape Town 2 hours 52 minutes ahead of the second placed Dongfeng Race Team.

It's why teams are searching for any speed advantage they can.

A lot comes down to trimming and sail set-ups but that search for speed has reached new levels.

Teams have calculated how many calories each sailor burns every day and worked out a nutrition plan around that.

In the last race, Team Brunel member Rokas Milivicius lost 8kg on the leg to Cape Town and struggled to keep weight on during the rest of the race.

Dongfeng have worked with a sports laboratory to come up with super foam memory mattresses to give their crew every opportunity of sleep. When they're being asked to push themselves in four-hour rotations, rest is critical.

It's clearly worth investing in the quality of life on board because it could be the difference between winning and losing.

The Volvo Ocean Race is incredibly hard to win but incredibly easy to lose, and it's why it's a thinking person's game. Teams make thousands of decisions over the course of a leg and it takes only one bad one to change everything.

Look at Dongfeng. They led for the first two weeks of the leg but fell in the rankings after they chose to gybe two-and-a-half hours later than their rivals.

They managed to claw back some of the gap by sailing half a knot faster in the same conditions than other teams, but it wasn't enough to get them into Cape Town first.

Team AkzoNobel, Sun Hun Kai Scallywag and Turn the Tide on Plastic all tried to cut the corner but were left behind as they fell off the back of a weather system.

It's been interesting to see the change in Scallywag skipper David Witt.

The Australian with the big personality is sailing his first Volvo and thought he would be able to transfer his success in skiffs to offshore sailing.

It hasn't turned out that way and he's gone from being overtly confident to depressed but he now has a level of appreciation of what others in the race can achieve.

Make no mistake, these are no ordinary sailors and that's why we are seeing a race that is tighter, after sailing halfway around the world, than what often happens on the Waitemata Harbour during rum racing on a Friday night.

Conrad Colman is the first Kiwi to sail in the Vendee Globe solo, non-stop round the world race.