Guy deBoer is racing again. Race founder Don McIntyre said that the surveyor's report on Spirit had been approved, giving the American the race's green card to restart in the Chichester Class, and the tracker now shows him moving, with 44 miles added to his distance sailed. It ends more than two weeks in Lanzarote and a dispute over paperwork. The mandatory sea trial was waived, so deBoer sets off roughly 1,400 miles behind the middle of the fleet, with the Cape Verde Islands within reach if something goes wrong.
Golden Globe Race 2026: distance sailed
Tracker snapshots, start to Day 30
Source: Golden Globe Race live tracker (Yellow Brick)
Out front, Damien Guillou made 161 nautical miles in 24 hours aboard Solarem and Pat Lawless 147 on Silvermines Hydro, which stretched the gap between them to 237 miles. Guillou's 182-mile run on 3 October is still the best of the race, and the race's stats page shows only two boats ahead of Jean-Luc Van Den Heede's 2018 pace and five ahead of Kirsten Neuschäfer's in 2022.
Trindade could shrink that margin. The stats page has Guillou at the island on 8 October and Lawless two days later, but McIntyre's reading of the models puts the centre of the South Atlantic high close by. Guillou would meet light air and then headwinds first, while Lawless keeps his breeze and closes at 30 to 40 miles a day. He reckons Guillou could hand back 100 to 150 miles, though everything depends on where the high settles.
Ertan Beskardes holds third on Miss Beagle, roughly 150 miles clear of the next boats after a 98-mile day. The race founder wondered the other day whether he was holding the boat too high. He now says there was a reason: Beskardes didn't want a lot of water over the deck while ploughing into the waves. McIntyre calls him the champion of the live broadcasts, a skipper who talks quickly between mouthfuls of breakfast in the cockpit, and he put up a photo of what he called a fast haircut. In a message read out at the briefing, Beskardes said he had been listening to live football on his HF radio and asked Don to "add east to my wind".
Etienne Messikommer came on the Window late at night with an apology for fumbling the buttons on his live equipment. Speaking mostly in French, he told viewers he had just been on the radio to Beskardes, who was already at two degrees south although the two had been side by side not long ago. "I don't know how he did it," he said. He accepted he had lost a lot of places, but said there was a long way to go and hoped his luck would turn too. A message read out earlier said his morale was rising now that he had found the south-southeast wind.
He gave viewers a tour of Bernard: his bookshelf, with Sylvain Tesson, Blaise Cendrars, Nathalie Azoulai and a Larousse encyclopaedia with "plenty to learn", and every water bottle and bag he could find gathered in one spot to add weight to the boat. When a wave stopped her dead, he urged her on. He sent goodnight messages to his family, telling them he thinks of them thousands of times a day, and said that listening to an audio cassette of voices recorded for him had done him a world of good. He signed off with a request. "Send me wind," he said. Pray for it, he told viewers, think about it, send him the energy, because he needs the breeze that will carry him south, and quickly.
Helga Marie "Mara" Løvenskiold Kveseth was on the Window earlier the same evening, working out aboard Showgirl under a moonless sky and the Milky Way to what sounded like an audiobook of Neuschäfer's memoir. She left a reef in the main overnight because she couldn't see what squalls were about, and told herself to shake it out in the morning. "What a beautiful night. What a life I'm living," she said, adding that she was grateful to be out there because she had chosen it. A week earlier she had questioned her own reasons for finishing.
On Monday McIntyre was quick to say that his remark about not knowing she was racing was no criticism. A skipper on a production cruising boat, looking after herself and still making the miles, is "what the GGR is about", he said. She also explained to viewers why star sights can't be taken in full darkness: you need the horizon, so you work just after sunset, with a few stars out and the horizon still visible. Neuschäfer's book keeps coming up on the broadcasts, and Beskardes and Andrea Lodolo have mentioned reading it too.
Guido Cantini's radio fault, McIntyre says, turned out to be a burnt-out antenna tuner. Cantini is rigging his emergency antenna, which will transmit on only one or two frequencies, though he may still be able to listen on others.
Farther back, Pär Nyman made 100 miles, the best 24-hour run behind the two leaders, and has passed Gunnar Christensen after trailing him by 102 miles three days earlier. Christensen likes to sit in the cockpit and watch the weather come, the briefing noted, and carries a car tyre as his storm drogue. Henry Wootton reported "a distinctly unpleasant south howler" and an "eroding sense of humour", while Isa Rosli spent five hours scraping barnacles in the calm, according to a message read out at the briefing, then covered 88 miles. Louis Kerdelhué, who barely moved for a day and left the race founder puzzled, made 38 miles.
