We were in Gothenburg Sunday, and had a peek at the Volvo Ocean Race regatta boats visiting Gothenburg. I'm not much interested in sports - even regattas - but one of the crew members joined specifically for the purpose of watching the port race, so of course we had to have a look.
First, a visit to the "racing village". Weather was quite grey. Here are some of the regatta boats ...
We weren't allowed to moore up anywhere to actually enter the area. Those guys were keeping an eye on us.
At 12:00 UTC - less than two hours later - the Port Race was to begin. The first regatta boats had already gone down the river when we arrived. One after another, they left.
There were lots of noise and traffic everywhere ... including helicopters. There was even some jet fighter planes flying in close formation, but I didn't manage to get photo of those.
Lots of RIBs, some for taking tourists, other for taking photos, and yet others for keeping spectactors out of the racing course.
Finally we managed to get in land in the racing village ...
The racing village was full of companies either wanting to get a fair share of tourist money, or sponsors wanting to promote themselves. Here is Volvo, where people could take a free test ride in an obstacle course. One of the obstacles was this steep hill. It looks quite crazy indeed, very steep inclination - and the cars were supposed to stop in the middle of the hill!
We were considering a bit to buy T-shirts, we were three persons and they had a 3-for-the-price-of-2-offer, but the shirts were still crazy expensive, so we didn't.
We left the racing village and headed down the river - together with other spectators and photo boats.
Twenty minutes until the racing start. They're already preparing, doing circles around the track.
There is quite some focus on maritime plastic pollution those days ...
Two minutes until race starts ...
And the race is going. I had expected that they would mark up the race track with yellow buoys, but instead they had those security boats that had the dual purpose of marking the race track and keeping spectators out of the track. It was quite frustrating not to have a clear border, the security boats were frequently rushing out to tell us we were too close. At the other end of the river it was very shallow, and I almost ran into ground while following the instructions from the "security" a bit too well. There were also police boats and military boats helping with the security.
It was a bit disappointing that they didn't have to do any tacking, except when rounding. Or, what did we know ... the wind was pretty sharp as they were going down the river, if they did need to tack once before rounding the other end of the racing track, we would be too far away to see it properly. Here the boats are on the way up the river.
Photo helicopter was hovering over us ...
Here the boats are rounding the upper rounding buoy. I felt I had gotten my share of attention from the security crew, so I kept some distance - though, looking at the other boats I think I could have gone closer. Anyway, my crew was satisfied and that's what matters.
We left from there as soon as the last boat had passed the bouy for the last time. Who won? I have no idea - though from the photos it should at least be possible to deduct which team was leading before the last half lap :-)
All photos available in better resolution on IPFS Qme5YSqaxEahk8kDYoBc77Nzxghuxm2eFZ8FoW9G7FQFbk. License: CC BY-SA 4.0