I have yet to succumb to the temptation of joining the many thousands of virtual sailors from all around the world playing the Volvo Ocean Race and Vendee Globe games but despite the fact that both races have been going for many weeks the total number of players is still increasing at an unbelievable rate.

The VOR virtual race has just celebrated its 100,000th player. That must drive a fair amount of traffic to their site. But hang on guys that’s kid’s stuff compared to the Vendee – would you believe 253,000? Now say each player is online for 30 minutes a day, that’s a total of nearly 21 years of online time per day. Or, for the Vendee alone, something like a total of 1,444 years for the duration of the race.

Now if I was an employer I’d keep a very careful watch on what my employees were up to at 1100 each morning because that’s when the weather updates are published.