Sail with New Freebooters

Well, I’ve passed the island of Fernando de Noranha, within hours of  the first of the real Volvo boats – but they started a day later than the SailOnLine players did. Now for something completely different: a 3,400 mile beat to the finish in Capetown, starting in the trade winds but eventually meeting the hefty [...]

The races go on. In real life, on the Official Volvo online simulator and on the sailonline.org simulator, the doldrums await. The Great Leveller is about to wreak havoc with the hierarchies established over the past few days. In real life, Telefonica Blue is back in contention after a 12-hour rest to get a badly-made [...]

This time I really did get totally carried away, and missed posting about the race altogether for a day. I spent yesterday convinced that I needed to head for the coast for as long as I dared in order to pick up a stronger wind, and sacrificed over 100 places in order to do so. [...]

The sailonline game is so addictive that I nearly forgot to pay for the next year’s hosting of this blog – it’s due tomorrow. It’s a heady mix of the feel of navigating a blue water race in real time with real weather forecasts, and the amazing companionship of the associated chat window. Mixed in [...]

Oops. Nearly forgot my deadline. After a busy day off line, which ended with a long champagne lunch party for a friend’s 60th birthday, I finally got  round to checking the damage. Actually, things weren’t much different from how I left them at the end of yesterday. A couple of course settings during the day [...]