Race online
Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club and Virtual Regatta team up for virtual Sydney to Auckland Ocean Race 2021.
27 January 2021
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The Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club, in conjunction with the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, has developed a race between Sydney and Auckland.
The course covers 1,250 nautical miles of unpredictable ocean – the equivalent of Sydney to Hobart and back again without stopping – and to win will require not only great preparation and sailing, but a large dose of endurance and self-sufficiency.
The race was scheduled to start on 30 January 2021 and had received great interest from around the globe, however, like many international sporting events, fell foul to the pandemic.
The race has been rescheduled for 29 January 2022, but in the meantime race, organisers have linked up with Virtual Regatta to provide a virtual race starting on the original date of 30 January 2021.
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Virtual Regatta started in 2010 as a small team of passionate designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs gathered around the idea that virtual sailing sports games can mix with real races and real skippers. Their research and development has brought them to release the most popular sailing games in the world with more than one million players each year.
Now, Virtual Regatta is an exclusive partner of the World Sailing federation and of the eSailing World Championship. Their product empowers people to take an active part in the most famous regattas across the world including the Vendée Globe, Route du Rhum, Sydney Hobart, The Ocean Race, America’s Cup and now the Sydney to Auckland Ocean Race.
The partnership between the great offshore and ocean races and Virtual Regatta brings together renowned offshore sailors, Corinthian sailors and gamers to race on a realistic platform that mirrors the live conditions of the race. Sail configurations, wind and sea conditions as well as routing choices are all part of the fun of the real and virtual races.
Competitors will have the opportunity to see how the conditions in the race would have played out; how the high and low pressure systems throughout the Tasman Sea affect the routing and duration of the race.
The game uses the actual weather conditions across the course for the race so it is not yet known if it is going be a long, slow race navigating a series of high pressures or a bumpy blast across the ditch characterised by low pressure systems coming up from the Southern Ocean.
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