Five home-built 19-footers slipped out of Marina de Lagos at one minute past midnight on Saturday 14 November, and the Globe 5.80 Transat was finally under way. It was 1:01pm in New Zealand. Ahead lies the Atlantic and the National Sailing Academy in Antigua, 3,530 nautical miles away along the race tracker's course.
Katherine Urpani had Capucinette in front after the first hour and a half. In a breeze barely strong enough to fill a sail, that lead was worth about as much as the three miles the fleet had sailed.
A different start line
This was never meant to be the start line. The Transat was due to leave from Marina Rubicón in Lanzarote today, at the end of a qualifying passage from Lagos.
That plan lasted four days. Race founder Don McIntyre cancelled the qualifier on 4 November and recalled the fleet as two storms threatened their route south. The boats were back in Lagos by 7 November, and the skippers spent the following week making repairs and watching Storm Charles roll across Portugal.
McIntyre then dropped Lanzarote altogether. The race is now a single leg, Lagos to Antigua.
Who is leading the Globe 5.80 Transat?
At 01:25 UTC, 84 minutes after the gun, the tracker had the fleet in this order:
1. Capucinette, Katherine Urpani (Malta), 1.9 knots
2. Origami, Dean Frost and Lee McCarthy (UK), 2.7 knots
3. Flow, Viivi Moisio (Finland), 1.8 knots
4. Inimini, Matthew Freestone (UK), 2.8 knots
5. Meraki, Bruce Payne (Australia), 1.8 knots
The speeds are from the latest tracker reading, not averages since the start, which is why a quicker boat can sit behind a slower one.
Places swapped while we watched. A Globe 5.80 is a 5.8-metre plywood boat, glassed and epoxied by its owner and fitted out with little thought for comfort. Six knots is a good pace for one. Off Lagos overnight they were managing two or three, with Inimini and Origami the quickest of the five on the last reading.
Where is the wind?
Not in the bay. The boats ghosted out of Lagos in the lee of the land, and on PredictWind the breeze sits further offshore, around 12 to 15 knots at about 01:30 UTC.
By 8am local time the models still have a moderate breeze off the Algarve, about 10 to 12 knots. Our reading of the ECMWF and GFS models on Friday put it from the west, which means windward work for boats heading south-west. Whoever gets clear of the coast first should find it first.
Bruce Payne, our adopted Kiwi
Go Boating claimed Bruce some time ago. He is a Tasmanian, which is close enough.
He is also the fleet's newest convert to ocean racing. Bruce took up sailing at 53, and this is the first race he has ever entered. On the qualifier Meraki spent most of the week towards the back. The restart treated him better, and for a while he sat comfortably mid-fleet before Viivi and Matthew slid past. He was fifth on the last reading, still making 1.8 knots.
He left Lagos with a container of poems and quotes sent in by his followers. The plan is to draw one out and read it every day until Antigua. Before casting off he summed up the night as five little boats and six skippers slipping out into the dark.
Why Trekka is not racing
There were meant to be six boats on the line. Yi Qun Liu, who goes by Yves, led the qualifier on Trekka for most of the way south before the recall. On the sail back to Lagos, late on 6 November, Trekka collided with a large ship about 40 miles south-west of the marina. Yves came through it unhurt, but the impact snapped her bowsprit.
Trekka is McIntyre's old boat, the one he raced in the 2021 Transat.
On Friday the race announced that Yves had withdrawn because of concerns about the weather. Organisers said they respected a difficult decision and hoped to see him on the line in 2028. They have given no further detail.
Around the fleet
Katherine Urpani was born in Malta and has worked as professional yacht crew since 1989, with seven Atlantic crossings to her name. On the qualifier she was the last skipper to hear about the cancellation. Capucinette's Starlink had failed.
Viivi Moisio, 24, is Finnish and runs her own campaign with Flow. A whale bumped the boat during the qualifier and bent her outboard, and she wrote afterwards that turning round for Lagos felt crushing.
Dean Frost and Lee McCarthy are the only two-handed crew. Matthew Freestone is the one skipper sailing without Starlink, and his last post from the pontoon was brief: next stop Antigua.
The first few tracker updates should show whether the fleet can find some breeze beyond Lagos. For now, five little boats have an Atlantic crossing ahead of them, and nobody has got very far.
Meet the skippers
Read our profiles of Katherine Urpani and Capucinette, Dean Frost, Lee McCarthy and Origami, Viivi Moisio and Flow, Matthew Freestone and Inimini, Bruce Payne and Meraki, and Yi Qun Liu (Yves) and Trekka.
For the background to the midnight start, read our start preview. The Globe 5.80 Transat is a sister race to the Golden Globe Race, which Go Boating follows every day.
