With just over 600 miles left to run on Sunday morning, team AkzoNobel is leading the Volvo Ocean Race fleet towards the finish of Leg 6 in Auckland.
© Rich Edwards/Volvo Ocean Race
The southern group of boats, with includes AkzoNobel, Scallywag and Turn the Tide on Plastic have extended to at least a 50 mile margin over the trailing trio.
The wild card in the mix is SHK/Scallywag. David Witt's team engaged Stealth Mode ahead of the 0700 UTC position report on Sunday. They'll reappear at 0100 Monday morning.
When they went off the grid, Sallywag was nominally in the lead on distance to finish, fractionally ahead of AkzoNobel. But in reality, it appears as if Akzo was better positioned about 30 miles further south.
Conditions are ideal at the moment for the leading triumverate, who as of 0700 were making about 5 knots of better boat speed.
"A beautiful start to a day of the what seems to be champagne sailing. Running out of runway! Could still be some surprises ahead," tweeted Dee Caffari from on board Turn the Tide on Plastic.
These is still a high pressure system to navigate around the top of New Zealand. Depending on its positioning, we could yet see some compression in the fleet. But at the moment the southern boats are having it all their way.
To the north, MAPFRE and Dongfeng are trying to sweep around the outside on Brunel and increasingly it looks like they might just do it... watch this space.
