Six days into the Route du Rhum, and the fleet is running on fumes, frayed nerves and, in one or two cases, harmonica solos.
The capsizes of Armel Le Cléac'h on Maxi Banque Populaire XI and Mathieu Perraut on Elvest have rattled the fleet in recent days, a stark reminder of how thin the margins are out there and how quickly a solo sailor's world can flip from control to chaos.
Tiredness is setting in too. "I don't even know what day it is any more, I feel dirty and I smell bad," Anne-Claire Le Berre admitted in a video from Upwind by MerConcept, her Ocean Fifty trimaran. Gaëtan Thomas, sailing the Class40 Barco Brésil, put it bluntly this morning: "It's rough, it's violent, we're constantly checking whether something's about to break."
Not everyone is drowning in gloom, though.
Basile Bourgnon, on the Ocean Fifty Edenred, sounded almost defiant about it: "It's hard, it's demanding, but we're enjoying ourselves." Corentin Horeau, racing the IMOCA MACSF, described slipping away from his pursuers as having "realised the dream of every solo sailor". Guillaume Pirouelle, on the Class40 Sogestran Seafrigo, kept it simple: "It's going fine, but it's still full-on." And Ian Lipinski, on Crédit Mutuel, offered the only logic that matters out there: "There's no turning back now."
Then there are the stowaways.
Théa Khelif, racing the Class40 Women of course, filmed a small speckled bird that hopped aboard uninvited, apparently quite content to inspect its new surroundings. She was 500 miles from the Portuguese coast, and much the same distance from the Azores. She's not alone. Nico d'Estais found a pigeon in the cockpit of his IMOCA Café Joyeux two days earlier. Achille Nebout, aboard the Class40 Amarris, filmed his own feathered visitor, joking, "So, do I put you out, or do you put me out?" Another bird settled on the thigh of Mathieu Claveau, racing the Class40 Inherent-Phare 40.
These odd little visitors seem to bring a welcome bit of softness to the grind.
Francesca Clapcich, on 11th Hour Racing, has found her own method for coaxing the wind round. She pulled out a harmonica mid-ocean and claimed, with a straight face, "I've noticed that when I play, the wind shifts the way I want it to." Then she played a tune. "Maybe you don't need to be a good skipper," she said, "just good on the harmonica."
Elsewhere, aboard the Vintage Mono entry Use It Again for Youth, Titouan Pillard turned his cockpit into a makeshift recording studio, rapping with an intensity nobody who knows him would have expected. The track was from French rapper PLK's back catalogue. Its title? "Émotif." Fitting, given the week.
