Guillou closes on Lanzarote as deBoer nears the island that ended his last race

Ten days into the 2026 Golden Globe Race, Damien Guillou is about to become the first skipper to reach a checkpoint. He was roughly 20 nautical miles from the Lanzarote film gate when the day's report went out, arrival expected around midday, the payoff of the early lead he built out of Biscay and has held ever since. It hasn't been a clean run in. Light patches cut his last day's total to 116 nautical miles, well down on his pace through the middle of the week, and the tracker's weather overlay has been showing more breeze than he's actually found on the water. Pat Lawless, holding better wind behind him, is expected roughly ten hours later, around midnight.

The chasing pack is arriving almost as one. Guido Cantini posted the fastest run of the report, 163 nautical miles aboard Hannah of Cowes, just ahead of Henry Wootton's 162. Seven boats, Ertan Beskardes, Etienne Messikommer, Cantini, Guy deBoer, Daniel Pinsky, Louis Kerdelhué and Andrea Lodolo, are now tracking to reach Lanzarote inside a single 24-hour window on the 18th, which should make for a chaotic finish at the film gate.

deBoer has his own reason to want this stretch of water done with. His 2022 race ended when he put his boat onto the rocks off Fuerteventura, the next island south of Lanzarote, and tore a hole in the hull big enough to end his campaign there and then. He's making good speed now, 154 miles aboard Spirit at close to 7 knots, and getting cleanly past that coastline this time will mean more to him than the numbers show.

Henry Wootton used his latest safety call to talk about the first day and a half of the race, and what it did to him. He told the shore team he'd spent those first 36 hours wondering what he'd actually signed himself up for, after years spent getting ready for it. It's a rare bit of honesty from inside the race, worth a listen if the call goes out publicly.

Further back, Pär Nyman is closing on Selim Yalçin again, and this time it looks like it'll stick. Nyman logged 150 miles at 6.6 knots aboard Lazy Otter, sailing through gusts past 30 knots under staysail and a deeply reefed main, and by all accounts loving every minute of it. Yalçin covered 119 miles in the same stretch.

That won't hold. Forecasters have the wind dropping out entirely across the Canaries approach from 20 September, for four to five days, right as Nyman and Yalçin are expected to be 150 to 170 nautical miles out still. If it plays out that way, both could be down to 30 miles a day while the rest of the fleet pulls clear at five times that pace, pushing their arrival dates toward the 23rd or 24th, maybe later.