11th Hour Racing Team win leg 5 of The Ocean Race

The 10 points they will earn for this leg will put them in first place on the overall leaderboard. By how much will depend on the battle taking place some 50 miles behind between Team Holcim PRB and Team Malizia.

As the victorious 11th Hour Racing Team crew stepped ashore we caught up with navigator Simon "SiFi" Fisher:

“It was a tricky leg! It was one of those legs where we spent a lot of time looking at the weather before the start and it looked like it was going to be either a quick trip or it was going to be quite a complicated trip and luckily it turned out to be the quicker trip.

"We went into this leg knowing that we needed to be aggressive and we knew we needed to have a good result in this leg to stand a chance in the race. So we tried to sail aggressively and we sailed our own race.
I am very happy to say it worked it nicely - everybody did a tremendous job.

11th Hour Racing Team
Finish : 29/05/2023 02:56:49 UTC
Race time: 7d 08h 41min 49s
Over ortho : 3 433.83 nm / 19.43 kts
Over ground : 3 873.84 nm / 21.92 kts

"We got some pretty gnarly conditions as well on the top of Scotland and just to keep the pace on through those conditions when it gets pretty difficult and tricky in these boats, it was impressive, everybody did an amazing job!

"These boats are incredible in conditions with big winds and flat water. We got used to going 30 knots so during the last few days when we slowed down to 18 it felt that we were parked!"

This was the report off the 11th Hour Racing Team boat earlier today. "Hi, it's Charlie Enright - filling in as your on board reporter... We just did our first gybe off the Norwegian archipelago... It’s pretty windy. We're about 25 miles ahead of Team Holcim-PRB and 40 miles ahead of Malizia. … we have about 4 hours of big wind and this big push and then it’s down to Denmark and the finish."

0700 local time / 0500 UTC: It's coming down to the wire for Team Holcim-PRB trying to hold off a hard-charging Team Malizia. At stake is second place on the double-points scoring leg 5.