Volvo Ocean Race: The best come from the West: Trio battles for stage victory

Can Simeon Tienpont's team AkzoNobel win a leg of the Volvo Ocean Race for the first time? The Dutch team is flying towards the stage harbour of Auckland as the leading boat. They had positioned themselves furthest west on their southerly course and put in the most extra miles in order to benefit from a much better weather window on day 19 of the leg than the three chasing teams Mapfre, Brunel and Dongfeng positioned to the east. Similar to AkzoNobel, Sun Hung Kai / Scallywag and Dee Caffari's team Turn the Tide on Plastic also opted for the west. While Caffari's team is currently in second place, David Witt's "Scallywags" have gone into invisible stealth mode. It is safe to assume that Witt's team is close to AkzoNobel and Turn the Tide on Plastic.

On Sunday afternoon, the top three battled for the stage win as they approached Auckland, which was still just over 500 nautical miles away at the time, in better winds of around 12 knots with a lead of around 100 nautical miles over the three boats to the east. The weather forecast currently holds no hope for the chasing boats. Dongfeng skipper Charles Caudrelier said: "They are sailing three to four knots faster than us. I don't think there's anything we can do to get close to them again." Instead, his team had resolved to win the three-way battle with Mapfre and Brunel.

Dee Caffari was not alone in saying that there had been concerns on board the leading boats in the west just 24 hours earlier: "The current weather picture on course for Auckland no longer shows the pain we thought we would experience. Those light winds that we thought we were going to have to deal with and that might have provided another restart are being pushed away. It looks like we're getting more pressure and it's staying with us. Keep your fingers crossed that this happens." For Caffari's young mixed team, it could be the first podium finish on one of the stages of this 13th edition of the race around the world. Scallywag's position in the final sprint to Auckland will be revealed on Monday night shortly after 2am German time. The organisers expect the first boats to cross the finish line on Tuesday, but have pointed out that the unstable wind conditions may mean that they will arrive even later.