Rick Tomlinson is the Official Photographer

for the Volvo Ocean Race 2008/9

The Volvo Ocean Race is a race around the world for professional sailors. Racing the highly tuned Volvo 70 yachts, each boat has 10 professional crew plus one media crew member. These are the fastest monohull yachts in the world, Ericsson 4 recently set a new world record of 602 nautical miles in 24 hours, an average speed of 25 knots! See the official Volvo Ocean Race site for the latest information.

The 2008 race started in Alicante-Spain in October with stopovers in Cape Town-South Africa, Cochin-India, Singapore, Qingdao-China, Rio de Janeiro-Brazil, Boston-USA, Galway-Ireland, Marstand & Stockholm-Sweden, and finish in St Petersburg-Russia in June 2009.

Rick will be photographing the yachts and crews during the arrivals, restarts and in-port races in each of the stopovers. Plus the extreme offshore rendezvous to photograph the boats either by ship or helicopter in Fernando de Noronha, Cape of Good Hope, Malacca Straits, and Cape Horn etc.

Formerly the Whitbread Round the World Race which is where Rick started his career crewing onboard Simon le Bon's yacht Drum. Rick went on to sail in a total of 4 Whitbread Races: Drum, The Card, Intrum Justitia and Team EF between 1985 & 1998. In the 2001 race Rick was the official photographer for the first Volvo Ocean Race, and in 2005 was the team photographer for the Ericsson Racing Team.

On this site I am simply showing a lot of photographs. Follow the links below to see the pictures from this race, or go to www.volvoceanrace.org for the full story

West Coast Ireland sortie

Rio Leg 6 Start and action

Rio Arrivals, stopover and In-port Race

Qingdao Leg 5 Restart

Qingdao Arrivals

Singapore Leg 4 Restart

Singapore Arrivals, stopover and In-port Race

Leg one start and sortie

Pre-start Alicante