Guillou closes on the equator as the chasing pack bunches so tight even the leaderboard stops meaning much

3 min read

Damien Guillou is about to cross the equator, and the gap he and Pat Lawless have opened on the rest of the Golden Globe Race fleet is starting to look close to unassailable. Guillou made 141 miles at 6.4 knots aboard Solarem, Lawless 124 miles at 6.2 knots on Silvermines Hydro, both now roughly 600 miles clear of the next group and still pulling away. Race founder Don McIntyre put it plainly on today's briefing: barring an accident, these two are closing in on untouchable.

Behind them, the story isn't who's winning, it's how impossible that question has become to answer. McIntyre admitted live on air that the leaderboard "doesn't mean much" right now, with boats lying abreast and often only ten miles separating one position from the next. He stumbled over the order himself trying to read it off the tracker. That explains something the telemetry threw up on its own today: Daniel Pinsky and Andrea Lodolo sitting on an exact tie for distance to finish, down to the mile. Not a coincidence so much as a symptom of a fleet this tightly packed.

Lodolo's eastward gamble paid off on timing, even if he told McIntyre directly he's disappointed with the breeze he actually found. He crossed a closing gap in the wind just before it shut, and BiBi is now making 4.4 knots for a 78-mile day, with the boat and its systems running clean. Henry Wootton had the more dramatic afternoon. On the verge of heaving to with the wind dead on the nose and making, in his own words to McIntyre, "bugger all distance," he tacked instead, crossed directly in front of Pinsky, picked up a brief shift, then read the breeze was thinner on that side and tacked straight back. Privateer is now doing 3.9 knots, 54 miles for the day. Pinsky himself, aboard Exodus, is sailing a straighter line in slightly better wind, 3.3 knots and 59 miles.

Further back, Ertan Beskardes is, in McIntyre's words relaying their conversation, "totally miffed with the boat." He's trying to work back west before it's too late for the move to pay off, 2.7 knots and 59 miles for now, with McIntyre expecting him to run out of breeze and park up later today. Guido Cantini is simply grinding along, 3.5 knots and 76 miles, close to the rhumb line. Etienne Messikommer sent McIntyre a handwritten letter from the Lanzarote film drop, including a strip from Bernard's own barograph, which McIntyre described as reading like a Geiger counter, flat and quiet where the weather was settled, jagged where it wasn't.

One story worth treating carefully rather than running straight: McIntyre relayed, secondhand via Helga Marie "Mara" Løvenskiold Kveseth's own broadcast, that a hawk landed on Pinsky's boat and ate two of the small birds he'd been keeping company with, and that he's since been trying to make friends with it. McIntyre said himself he doesn't know if it's true or exaggerated in the telling. Good colour, not yet a confirmed fact.

Kveseth's own update was more straightforward. Sailing Showgirl at 3.4 knots for a 28-mile day, she's holding her course out to the west and recently dropped her volunteer weather buoy over the side, one of only two in the fleet still carrying one, Messikommer's keeping his for the Indian Ocean leg ahead.

A blocking patch of light air sitting between the eastern group, Messikommer, Cantini and Beskardes, and the trade winds further south is expected to ease over the next three days. When it does, McIntyre expects the boats currently stuck behind it to start closing back in on the group that's already through.