Oceans ahead

With The Ocean Race route announced, skipper Charlie Enright talks about what lies ahead for the event and for 11th Hour Racing

The 2021-22 edition of The Ocean Race will stop in 10 cities including for the first time the Cape Verde islands, Shenzhen and Genoa.

The event, previously the Volvo Ocean Race, will start from Alicante in Spain in October 2021 with professional crews racing two classes of boat, the ‘traditional’ VO65s and the IMOCA 60s that are normally seen in the Vendée Globe. The 38,000-mile route will finish in Genoa in the summer of 2022.

Newport, Rhode Island, is one destination that the race has visited many times since its Whitbread days and there to support the Newport announcement was local man Charlie Enright, who has announced his plans to skipper the 11th Hour Racing Team in the event. “In some places around the world, you walk down the street and you’re just another person,” he said. “You walk down the street here in Newport with your team gear on and your name on your back and people know who you are. Having the race come here is not something we take lightly.”

Looking at the route, he said: “It’s going to be a long leg from Cape Town to China. What side we left Australia was up in the air for a while and in some ways it’s disappointing to see a little less Southern Ocean, but with these IMOCAs you run into volumetric issues down below, so how we were going to provision for a 30 plus day leg I don’t know, given the space available. It was always going to be a hard leg whichever way we did it, but it’s good to get certainty on it and start planning.”

Enright was speaking from his home in New England, back there with his young family after several months in France. He had been immersing himself in the French IMOCA culture, readying himself for “a personal Everest”, the Transat Jacques Vabre, which he completed with hugely experienced Frenchman Pascal Bidégorry on the old Hugo Boss in November 2019.