Damien Guillou is a day from Trindade, and Don McIntyre says the Frenchman intends to drop anchor in the island's lee, look the boat over and sail on again. With a lead this size, he can afford it.
Solarem has 22,231 nautical miles to go and is making 5.8 knots after a 152-mile day. At the previous update she was closer to seven, so the breeze is already thinning. Pat Lawless trails by 261 miles in Silvermines Hydro, still doing 5.6 knots. The race's daily statistics board gave Guillou the longest 24-hour run at 151 miles, 12 fewer than the day before, against a fleet average of 96.
Golden Globe Race 2026: distance sailed
Tracker snapshots, start to Day 32
Source: Golden Globe Race live tracker (Yellow Brick)
The stop is a chore, not a tactic. Barnacles have settled on the stern of Solarem, and McIntyre expects Guillou might go over the side to scrape them off. He won't go ashore, and McIntyre doubts he will stay at anchor more than a couple of hours.
Leaving is where it gets awkward. A high is building in the South Atlantic and the forecast shows almost no wind around Guillou for a day after he gets under way. Lawless could take back 50 or 60 miles. Beyond that, the centre of the high pushes both boats south for about four days at roughly 100 miles a day before either can turn east. McIntyre knows what a late turn costs. In the BOC race he held on while a rival turned on time and lost 200 miles in a single move. He thinks Lawless could still be level with Guillou by Cape Town if the high favours the boat behind.
For now the gap is Guillou's to lose. The fleet averages some 1,500 miles back, and McIntyre puts him about a week ahead of Jean-Luc Van Den Heede's winning pace from 2018. That points to Hobart around 7 December, possibly earlier. McIntyre won't book flights until Guillou is under the Cape of Good Hope.
Beskardes Pulls Away on the Easterly Track
Ertan Beskardes holds third in Miss Beagle, 23,291 miles from home, and his 152-mile day matched the leader's. He slept through the equator, which he crossed between 2am and 4am, and woke up in the Southern Hemisphere. By the 04:00 position he was 17 miles south of the line.
His eastern route is paying. The south-east trades bend around the top of the high, so boats farther west must beat into them, wet and slow, while Beskardes gets a wider angle that should be drier and perhaps a knot quicker. McIntyre had him about 230 miles clear of the pack and expects that to grow to 350 by the latitude of Recife, roughly three and a half days away.
Aboard, it was a busier evening than the numbers suggest. When the wind swung, Miss Beagle fell 30 degrees west of the course he wanted, and he spent an hour trimming sheets and rolling in the genoa to bring her back to 190. Then a ship crept up astern. He tried it on VHF, switched on a strobe that lit his sails from masthead to boom, and kept calling until he was sure he'd been seen. His masthead light has been dead since Gonzalo. He is aiming for Trindade around Friday 16 October, listens to the BBC World Service for company, and pulls flying fish off the deck with a boathook. He is nearly through Kirsten Neuschäfer's book and tells anyone planning a Golden Globe to read it. There is no fridge, toilet or hot water aboard, and he has come to terms with warm beer.
The Middle of the Fleet Goes Quiet
Behind him, the fleet is crawling. Andrea Lodolo's BiBi is fourth on 23,556 miles to go, with Daniel Pinsky's Exodus just astern on 23,591. Mara Kveseth's Showgirl is sixth after a position refresh. Her tracker had gone quiet, and race headquarters had estimated her about 45 miles behind Pinsky.
Further back the numbers are bleak. Étienne Messikommer's Bernard covered 49 miles in 24 hours, and Henry Wootton's Privateer only 25. Matt Woodside's Tipi Haere was doing 1.2 knots. Guido Cantini's Hannah of Cowes is making 3.7, Isa Rosli's Olleanna 4.4, Gunnar Christensen's Pompoen 3.6 and Pär Nyman's Lazy Otter 3.2. Louis Kerdelhué's IE Charge managed four knots and 74 miles.
The next 48 hours look light for everyone except Beskardes. Wootton and Messikommer face weak headwinds. Lodolo, Pinsky and Kveseth sit on port tack, squeezed toward the bulge of Brazil, with the island group the viewers named as Fernando de Noronha to work around. Relief should reach the western boats in about two days.
What the Skippers Are Saying
Messikommer used his Window Live hour to read from his logbook, a notebook crowded with position sums, daily entries and small drawings. He did not dress it up. He called the past ten days the hardest he has spent on a boat, ten days in which he went from two days behind Guillou and Lawless to ten. One entry, written at the bottom of it, was all homesickness and frustration at watching others sail away. Another told how he got here. Months before the start, McIntyre showed him photographs of a boat for sale while McIntyre's wife Jane tried to stop her husband from poisoning the young Frenchman's mind. She was too late. He also spoke of cassettes of voices from home, recorded by his sister, and of a breeze arriving as he talked that felt like a lifeline.
Kveseth gave her hour to the people who got her to the start line, among them a sailmaker who spent his last working days before an Atlantic crossing of his own getting her boat ready. She also reported that Pinsky had made ice cream: a coconut and lime base with mango, chilli flakes and chocolate. As the self-styled ice cream queen of the fleet, she took that as a challenge and answered with strawberry and Nutella. She suspects her flexible solar panel, mounted over the bimini, is blocking her tracker. She weighed using her engine and dropped the idea when she worked out the penalty was two weeks. Her aim is Hobart before the end of January.
Nyman slept in the cockpit for the first time and woke to a wind shift that put him back on course. He tested his eggs by floating them, found cooking breakfast on a live stream oddly intimate, and has ruled out fishing from the boat because a hook or a spine could turn septic a long way from help.
deBoer Back at Speed
Guy deBoer is at sea again after Lanzarote and moving quickly in Spirit. He logged 147 miles at 6.1 knots, and the fastest four-hour leg of the race, 6.9 knots, on the run down from the Canaries. He is nearly 3,000 miles behind Guillou, too far to threaten the leader, though he could pick off some boats ahead. The stop put him in the Chichester Class, outside the rankings, and his forecast is good for three or four days.
Kerdelhué Stays Silent
Louis Kerdelhué is still ignoring an order to call race headquarters urgently, and he has not gone live on Window Live either. McIntyre is untroubled. He rates the young Frenchman fit and capable, with 16,000 miles in the boat before the start, and says every edition has stories that only come out after the finish.
One for the Diary
Race headquarters will hold a public briefing at Le Patagos restaurant in Les Sables d'Olonne on 16 October at 6pm local time, with a live call to Guillou at 6.30pm (16:30 UTC) streamed on YouTube and Facebook.
