At midday on Tuesday, Ertan Beskardes went live on the GGR Window from the cockpit of Miss Beagle, tea in hand, and stayed on air for two and a half hours. She was making five and a half to six knots south in what he called champagne sailing. He had woken to find the sun rising almost exactly on his left, which told him without a glance at the compass that he was heading due south. Lunch was new potatoes boiled in seawater, fried onions with pepper and cayenne, and wraps, and he was taking two or three bucket showers a day in the heat.
He keeps a piece of wood, cut by his friend Robin Davy to protect a hatch from the skipper's weight. One side lists his HF frequencies, the other his waypoints: Tristan, Trindade, Hobart and the Southern Ocean exclusion zones all the way to Cape Horn. Beskardes says he has memorised every course, distance and position since leaving Les Sables d'Olonne and rarely needs the chart. His noon sight put him at one degree north, 27 west, and he'd be happy, he said, to be within ten miles.
He expected to cross the equator in the small hours, with about 60 miles to run at 13:30 UTC, though not everyone feels it. "You just feel a little bump," he said. "That's how it normally happens, I've been told. I didn't feel it last time." He plans to wait for his next broadcast, at 21:30 UTC on Wednesday (10:30 on Thursday morning in New Zealand), to pour a drop for Neptune and drink the rest of the little bottle with his viewers.
Between jobs he listens to the BBC World Service each evening and has found Chinese stations and Texan sermons on the HF dial, because "it's just nice to listen to somebody talking on the other side". He talks to Etienne Messikommer on the radio twice a day, and thinks the leaders are so far ahead they are almost in a different weather system. His own lead is thin, he says: a couple of bad days and the others will be on top of him. He cut his own hair and doesn't expect to win any competitions with it. Of Miss Beagle he said, "I'm just a passenger here, temporary custodian." Perhaps, he joked, she was having a chat with Jean-Luc Van Den Heede, who sailed her as Matmut. He is certain she went a knot faster with the Frenchman aboard.
Gunnar Christensen began Tuesday with coffee and an apology to race headquarters for a microphone that had failed the day before. Wagner would have suited the morning, he said, but copyright law rules it out. Aboard Pompoen, which he calls the Mighty Pumpkin, he counted seven Atlantic crossings before the race. The passage to Trindade is number eight, and the run under Cape Town will be number nine "if we make it that far". He is sailing in support of the Seafarers' Mental Health charity, and he talked about it plainly. After the storm there were two days when he got himself into "a kind of dark place", he said. He is out of it now.
He is candid about where he stands. "We haven't had a lot of luck," he said, blaming the storm for blowing him back east along the African coast, and he wants "to get back in the game". His advice to the 2030 entrants is short: just go rhumb line, and don't get fancy. A winch handle is jammed for good in his port mast winch, which he has decided to leave, since he'll always know where it is. He has the next race in mind, too. He'd like to sail a leg of the Ocean Globe Race with the charity, though not the whole thing, and has told his wife she can fly out to meet him at stops in South Africa, New Zealand and Punta del Este.
Pär Nyman came on in the evening UTC with a bolt problem. He had spent hours fitting a clutch on Lazy Otter before realising he'd put the last bolt in from the wrong side, and now it won't come out. He is leaving it until he feels more energised. "I'm alone on the boat," he told viewers, "but there's still some idiot that is misplacing my stuff all the time." He moved between Swedish, English and a little Spanish, had spoken to his daughter on the shortwave that day, and thanked the friends who helped set up his radio. He says he has no spinnaker left, having flown them in too much wind.
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He also spoke up for Helga Marie "Mara" Løvenskiold Kveseth. Nyman said she told him when they first met, in November, that she was getting horrible messages online. He called that disgusting and unacceptable, and said he suspects it is partly a gender issue. He praised her experience and her "fighting spirit". As for his own race, "I'm not here to win this race. I'm here to have fun and learn things." He wants to become a good sailor, he added, particularly in the Southern Ocean.
