All seven boats participating in the Volvo Ocean Race arrived in Newport on Tuesday morning. Light winds made for a slow ending to the eighth leg of the race and kept many fans awake well into the morning as they waited for the arrival.
The Spanish vessel MAPFRE crept into the harbor first at around 6:45 a.m., making a surprise comeback with a 1 minute, 1 second lead over Dutch team Brunel. Team Vestas, skippered by Charlie Enright, a Rhode Islander, came in third place, followed by the Dongfeng team.
“I was down here from midnight to 8:30 this morning watching them come on in,” said Jen Contreras, a volunteer at the village. “I committed to it.”
Lisa Charrier, the chair of the Newport volunteer program for the race village, said people have flown in from as far away as Ireland, Germany and New Zealand to help out.
“We’ve probably had 75 volunteers come through our volunteer center today,” she said.
In total, approximately 550 volunteers are helping to organize and run the many attractions at Fort Adams including the “race boat experience,” which allows daring visitors find out what life onboard a race boat is really like.
Newport is the only stopover in North America during the year-long race, and it comes at the end of the eighth leg of the race. The next leg, the ninth in a series of 11, will see the boats travel more than 3,000 nautical miles to Cardiff, Wales.
The Volvo Ocean Race Village at Fort Adams is open from the May 8th until the 20th.
