Damien Guillou leads the Golden Globe Race by 890 nautical miles from Ertan Beskardes at the 20:00 UTC tracker update on Monday 9 November 2026, Day 65 of the race. Guillou's Solarem has 18,175 miles to go and made 145 miles in 24 hours. Beskardes's Miss Beagle made 167, the best run in the fleet, and trimmed the lead as he went. The race office says a current off South Africa is helping him, and that Guillou is closing on the first southern waypoint of the Indian Ocean leg.
Here is how each skipper's distance sailed has built since Les Sables d'Olonne:
Golden Globe Race 2026: distance sailed
Tracker snapshots, start to Day 65
Source: Golden Globe Race live tracker (Yellow Brick)
Who is leading the Golden Globe Race?
Guillou is first on 18,175 miles to go, Beskardes second on 19,065, Etienne Messikommer third on 19,454 and Henry Wootton fourth on 19,501. Measured in miles still to sail, the gap at the front has narrowed by 21 miles since our snapshot at 16:00 UTC on 8 November, because Beskardes cut 191 miles from his distance to finish in those 28 hours against 170 for Guillou. Six of the 16 starters have now retired, the race office says, leaving ten racing. Mara Kveseth announced her retirement on 7 November and Showgirl has dropped off the tracker, which moves Daniel Pinsky up to fifth.
How did Beskardes find 167 miles?
The race office says Miss Beagle is riding a current of two to three knots in the Agulhas system, although Beskardes is unaware of it. His own recordings from Sunday morning, 8 November, describe the effect without the cause. The water had gone choppy, he said, the boat was being pushed left and right, and it was slowing him down. At about 10:25 UTC he took a run of sun sights with his sextant, coaxing the sun out from behind the cloud and thanking it when it appeared. His working put him at roughly 38 degrees 50 minutes south and 16 degrees east, with the caveat that he might be 10 miles out. The GPS figures on his overlay at that moment read 39.06 south and 15.85 east, so his sextant fix landed within about 15 miles of the GPS position shown on the broadcast overlay. He added that the slow progress since the day before was not his fault. By Monday morning the sea had turned lumpy again, and he began to wonder aloud whether the current had something to do with it. A passing ship had earlier helped confirm his sextant work, as we reported in a passing ship backs Beskardes' sextant.
There was plenty going on below decks, too. He boiled new potatoes in seawater and pointed out it came pre-salted. Soup and green olive paste on flatbread sorted out a chilly Monday morning, too. A solar panel that had stopped working, thanks to oxidised connectors, was running again, and he greeted a battery reading of 13.2 volts as a number he had not seen for ages. One gadget still refused to charge, and he told it, kindly, that he was disappointed in it. A little later a small bird flew by and he spent a moment calling it to come and land on the boat.
Wootton closes on Messikommer for third
Wootton made 166 miles in Privateer against 159 for Messikommer in Bernard, and the gap for third place is now 47 miles, down from 58 at our last snapshot. We described Wootton's earlier surge in Wootton's 156 miles tighten the Golden Globe Race chase. Pinsky made 134 miles in Exodus and sits 125 miles behind Wootton.
Across the fleet
Pär Nyman made 148 miles in Lazy Otter and Guido Cantini 114 in Hannah of Cowes, where the race office says light winds slowed him and his more northerly route could bring some tricky currents near South Africa. Isa Rosli's Olleanna made 105 miles in lighter air, with more breeze approaching from behind, and Gunnar Christensen's Pompoen made 99.
The race office says Andrea Lodolo's race is over and that BiBi is heading for Cape Town, which it expects him to reach in about five to six days. He made 73 miles in the last 24 hours, and the tracker still lists him in seventh place. Guy deBoer is aboard the Brazilian Navy corvette Barroso, bound for Rio de Janeiro with an expected arrival on 11 November, and Spirit is adrift in the South Atlantic. We reported on the emergency in Solo sailor seeks urgent rescue after fall off Brazil coast.
Matt Woodside's Tipi Haere still has a public tracker problem, so the distances shown for him are not reliable. The race office plans to switch the public feed to his backup tracker and raise its reporting from every 12 hours to every four.
What to watch in the Golden Globe Race this week
Our rough reading of the PredictWind forecast for the South Atlantic shows a cold front sweeping through the western end of the fleet on Monday night UTC, followed by a lull. At midday UTC on Tuesday 10 November there is a band of light air, 5 to 10 knots, along the line of the front, with westerlies of 10 to 15 knots either side. On Wednesday and Thursday both models we compare, PredictWind's own and GFS, show westerlies of 10 to 20 knots with patches of lighter air in the south. They disagree on where those patches sit, and GFS holds a core of 20 to 25 knots in the middle on Thursday.
That is our own reading. It looks like a gentler week after the storms, but not a risk-free one, and entrants are not allowed weather routing, so every call on sail and reefing stays with the skipper on deck. Beskardes needs the current to keep helping, Wootton is 47 miles off third, and Lodolo has a few days to run to Cape Town.
Follow the whole race on our dedicated Golden Globe Race 2026 page.
