Damien Guillou is still running away with the Golden Globe Race. After 55 days at sea, the Frenchman in Solarem leads by 754 nautical miles, while the rest of the fleet crawls through light air under a South Atlantic high. Gunnar Christensen in Pompoen has even said sorry to the wind itself, after a night of tacking and some salty language, and a small, fast-forming low is about to give everyone something new to think about.
Let's get into the detail. Damien Guillou leads the Golden Globe Race by 754 nautical miles after 55 days at sea. At 20:00 UTC on Saturday 31 October, Solarem had 19,395 nautical miles to run to the finish at Les Sables d'Olonne, having cut 160 miles off that distance in 24 hours. That was 55 miles more progress than any other skipper and 98 more than second-placed Ertan Beskardes in Miss Beagle, who cut 62. Further back, Daniel Pinsky in Exodus has passed Mara Kveseth in Showgirl for fifth place, nine miles apart, while the pack idles under a South Atlantic high and asks the sky politely for wind. The next event on the board is a small, fast-forming low that both weather models bring close to the middle of the fleet on Sunday night and Monday UTC. Distances are miles to the finish or miles sailed, from the 20:00 UTC tracker, unless stated.
Golden Globe Race at a glance, Day 55 (20:00 UTC, 31 October)
Leader: Damien Guillou, Solarem, 19,395 nautical miles to go, 7,717 sailed
Second: Ertan Beskardes, Miss Beagle, 20,149 to go, 754 behind the leader
Third: Andrea Lodolo, BiBi, 20,367 to go, 218 behind Beskardes
Biggest cut in distance to finish over 24 hours: Guillou with 160 miles, then Gunnar Christensen in Pompoen with 105
Closest pair: Pinsky on 20,702 and Kveseth on 20,711, nine miles apart, with Pinsky up to fifth from sixth
Golden Globe Race 2026: distance sailed
Tracker snapshots, start to Day 55
Source: Golden Globe Race live tracker (Yellow Brick)
Who is leading the Golden Globe Race on Day 55?
Guillou has now sailed 7,717 miles, 1,273 more than Beskardes, and the gap on distance to go has grown from 656 miles a day earlier. Beskardes made 62 miles towards the finish in the lull and sits 218 miles clear of Andrea Lodolo, who made good just 28 in BiBi and holds third on 20,367. From Beskardes in second to Mara Kveseth in sixth the field spans only 562 miles, Guillou's lead over second place is now bigger than the whole gap between second and sixth, so the real contest is the scrap for the places behind him.
The PredictWind charts show him out on his own in the stronger wind. On Saturday evening his pink track runs out to the south-east into 20 to 25 knots, while the rest of the fleet sits in pale blue and green air at 10 knots or less. Through Sunday a deep Southern Ocean low passes south of him with 30 to 40 knots in its core. That keeps him on its northern edge, where the wind pushes hard.
Christensen has a word with the wind
Gunnar Christensen's Friday night ended with an apology. On Friday evening he was tacking Pompoen every hour or so through fickle south-easterly headwinds, five or six times by his count, and cursing the breeze at every one of them. Around ten at night he stopped, sat down and had a quiet chat with the wind instead. He told it he knew it had no idea who he was, that it was only doing its own thing, and that he was sorry about the language. An hour or two later the wind swung round to the north-east and picked up, and by about one in the morning he was reaching along on course. He stopped short of claiming cause and effect, but he did wonder if the wind gods had been listening. With the wind coming round behind him he now plans to run wing on wing under the downwind Yankees, which beats the asymmetric spinnaker idea he never expected to be considering.
The tracker noticed. He cut 105 miles off his distance to the finish, the second-best of the day behind Guillou, which put Pompoen 15 miles clear of Matt Woodside in Tipi Haere, on 21,184 against 21,199. With eleventh and twelfth only 15 miles apart, one decent night is enough to swap them. The overlay at 07:50 UTC caught him at the wheel in a red jacket, 27.2 degrees south and 21.3 west, making 5.1 knots.
Then came what he called Coffee Saturday. With the camera running he ground and pressed a pot, tried on a borrowed neck gaiter that turned out too baggy. He asked the race office for the weather in the United Kingdom on a call and was told they couldn't possibly say, until they finally conceded it was a nice autumn day. A pair of brown seabirds with white face patches had been gliding with him all week, but he has no bird book aboard and is blaming the shore team. He is also planning to plug in the pumpkin lights tonight, for Halloween and for a boat whose name is Afrikaans for pumpkin.
Between sips he reported a job well done. On Friday he replaced the fuse wiring behind a stubborn engine relay, so the engine now starts without a wrestling match, and he ran it for two hours to top up the batteries. A passing ship called him up, was asked not to alter course, and left him with a position fix and the news that he was parked on a high.
Messikommer asks the whole planet for wind
Etienne Messikommer spent Saturday morning UTC getting Bernard ready for a storm that has not yet turned up. At 10:15 UTC the overlay had him at 32.2 degrees south and 12.2 west, creeping along at 1.5 knots in bright sun under clouds he thought looked like ice forming on a lake.
His project was a fourth reef. He rigged a temporary set-up with a carabiner as the pulling point, a strap underneath and a couple of screws, tested it, then found he could not use the third reef alongside it, so he moved on to testing the second.
When his camera battery began to fade he signed off by blowing kisses at the lens and asking the whole Earth, region by region, to please send some wind. Bernard weighs close to 10 tonnes, he explained, and five knots of breeze is not going to move her. He also found time to call an orangutan his buddy and to plug the conservation charity that looks after them.
On our reading of the models, Bernard is sitting close to the likely track of the low.
Screws, pudding and a friendly squabble
Pär Nyman in Lazy Otter spent Friday evening UTC on housekeeping. At 29.6 degrees south and 19.2 west, barely moving, he showed viewers his sorted screws. Each size, from M4 to M12, now lives in its own labelled bag, and he was thrilled that the job in hand needed only the M6 bag. He had also treated mouldy clothes with borax and finished a rigging job on the running backstay. A hot vanilla rice pudding, he decided, is really a soup. He admitted he fancied a gin and tonic more than nuts. A small mystery about his Window LIVE broadcast times was solved when he found the next schedule printed on the back of the sheet already pinned to his cabin wall. He made 56 miles and is ninth on 21,019.
Kveseth, meanwhile, has declared tea season. The cabin dipped below 20 degrees for the first time, so the duvet is out, and she says there is nothing better than a cold room and a warm quilt. She has been living on soup built from kilo bags of dried vegetables, with rice noodles, soy sauce, tofu or chickpeas, and toast or grilled cheese on the side. She also spent a happy minute failing to recall the name of the Portuguese man o' war drifting past, settling on 'submarine warship'. Dolphins and a sunset came with it.
Her radio banter with Daniel Pinsky in Exodus has a running joke. She said the safest spot on the Atlantic is wherever Pinsky is not, since he keeps landing in the worst of the weather. Pinsky replied that it was the other way round: she stays with him, not him with her. Kveseth said all three of them, with Messikommer, had changed to downwind sails and agreed never to sail away from each other again.
On the board, Pinsky has moved up to fifth on 20,702 after an 86-mile day, nine miles clear of Kveseth on 20,711, who made 49. A day earlier it was the other way round, with Kveseth fifth and Pinsky sixth. Messikommer holds fourth on 20,662 after 53 miles. Henry Wootton in Privateer and Guido Cantini in Hannah of Cowes are 19 apart, on 20,795 and 20,814, after 71 and 66 miles. Isa Rosli in Olleanna is tenth on 21,106.
Where is the weather risk for the fleet?
The question for the middle of the fleet is Sunday night into Monday UTC. Our read of the two global models, the European ECMWF and the American GFS, side by side, has both curling a compact low into life near 33 degrees south and 13 degrees west, with a ring of 30 to 40 knots round it. The two models place it within a degree or so of each other. By Monday night it has raced east to about the Greenwich meridian and starts to fade through Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving lighter air behind it.
That puts Messikommer, Kveseth and Pinsky close to its path. Beskardes, further east, is likely to meet it a day later. Christensen, at 27 south, is on its north-western side and says he wants to be far enough south to catch it. Boats near the centre will see the wind build quickly and then swing hard as it passes, while those a few hundred miles north or south get only a fraction. These are forecasts, not observations, and a small, fast-developing low is hard to pin down, so its position and strength could shift by a few hundred miles between model runs. We read the ECMWF and GFS runs available on Sunday morning, NZ time.
For Guillou the question is how far the westerlies lift his daily runs. For everyone else it is whether a useful breeze turns up before the low does. Our report on the fleet stalling has the background, and the second gale shows what the leaders have already come through. Pinsky's night of hand-steering and Guillou's run through the storm gap show how hard these systems can bite.
Follow the whole race on our dedicated Golden Globe Race 2026 page.
