SAILING VOLVO OCEAN RACE: AFTER THEIR first full day at sea, the fleet in the Volvo Ocean Race is again preparing for a highly strategic game as the leave Cape Town astern and enter the Southern Ocean on leg two of the event.

But unlike past races, this foray south is certain to be short-lived, and although boatspeeds will once shoot up as they negotiate a fast-moving depression, a repeat of Torben Grael's record run of 602-miles in 24-hours just over three weeks ago seems improbable - for now.

Instead, the first objective in this leg will be a scoring-gate stretched south of Mauritius along the 580E line of longitude.

And so the first conundrum for the tacticians on each team.

Option A is to head south and catch a fast ride east and pick up points at the gate. The problem here is that, while lucrative, it's a course that makes minimal impact on the distance to the finish (DTF) at Kochin, India.

Option B is a trade-off of boatspeed versus DTF where, by staying to the north, a scoring opportunity at the gate may be sacrificed to be closer to the finish, especially with lighter winds in the central Indian Ocean.

The reality is that for just about every professional in this event there is a huge unknown quotient: nobody has raced these waters.

And while the race has been utterly altered from its Whitbread roots of derring-do amidst the ice-bergs of the Southern Ocean, the revised course has started its Asian odyssey while reserving something for the purists in the fifth leg when the approaches to Cape Horn bring the eight boats into the deep south once more.

But the alteration of the route also matches history: as the race changed in recognition of its commercial imperatives, so too did the clipper ships of old, upon whose epic races to Europe from the Far East are based the modern circumnavigations.

But such issues were last weekend far from the thoughts of the 88 crew-members that departed the "Tavern of the Seas" on Saturday afternoon.

In his pre-start remarks, third-placed Green Dragon skipper Ian Walker predicted a highly tactical battle for 18 days. For race followers, he expects the overall standings on a daily basis will appear upset as the 4,500-mile leg becomes a high-stakes gamble of Snakes and Ladders.