Guillou Pauses at Trindade, Golden Globe Fleet Awaits Trades

Day 33, Saturday 10 October 2026 (NZDT). Positions from the telemetry data.

Damien Guillou has reached the first mark of the South Atlantic and stopped to look over his boat, Pat Lawless is closing, and the whole fleet is about to meet the southeast trades. The skippers' own broadcasts say as much about the race as the tracker does.

A leader at rest

Damien Guillou has earned a breather. The Frenchman tucked in behind Trindade island in Solarem and spent a couple of hours checking the boat after some rough going on the approach. He had told race management first, which is all the organisers ask of a skipper who plans to stop, so nobody ashore panicked at a motionless dot.

The tracker shows the cost. Guillou covered 67 miles in the 24 hours to the 16:00 UTC update, well under the 150 and more he has been banking, though he was back at 5.9 knots with 21,761 miles to sail. Earlier in the day Don McIntyre had him down near three knots with light air ahead for another 12 to 24 hours, until a second high builds and fills in behind him.

That suits Pat Lawless. The Irishman was making 5.4 knots in Silvermines Hydro with fresher breeze, and on distance sailed (4,611 miles to Guillou's 4,753) he sits 142 miles back. The distance-to-finish gap looks far bigger, but the tracker's reference route beyond Trindade is being redrawn, so the sailed figure is the one to trust. McIntyre reckoned Lawless had clawed back about 60 miles in a day and could keep gaining while the leader waits for wind. Both should find good reaching conditions heading south through to roughly 14 October.

Third place belongs to Ertan Beskardes, who logged 153 miles in Miss Beagle and has 22,953 to go, a comfortable 237 miles clear of Andrea Lodolo's BiBi (136 miles on the day). Daniel Pinsky's Exodus is fifth after a 107-mile run, and Mara Kveseth's Showgirl sixth on 97. A tight bunch follows: Étienne Messikommer's Bernard (62), Guido Cantini's Hannah of Cowes (77), Isa Rosli's Olleanna (93) and Henry Wootton's Privateer (41). Pär Nyman's Lazy Otter and Matt Woodside's Tipi Haere are level on 23,643 miles to go.

Gunnar Christensen's Pompoen made nothing toward the finish on the 24-hour board. Louis Kerdelhué's IE Charge managed 18 miles; a low-pressure system has wrapped light air around him again, and McIntyre said he was doing about 1.3 knots simply to hold steerage.

Enter the trades

The pressure pattern that has stalled half the fleet is about to shift. McIntyre expects the southeast trades to spread north across every boat within a day or two. Those furthest west, including Wootton, Pinsky and Kveseth, simply carry on south with the wind on the beam. The boats to the east, among them Christensen and Kerdelhué, will meet the breeze on the nose and must tack onto port to make their southing. McIntyre called it the start of the drag race. He expects Wootton, who was openly sour about his luck in the calms but has since made his peace, to start picking off places in his big, powerful Privateer.

Guy deBoer, restarted in Chichester Class and no longer on the main leaderboard, is driving south in a strong following breeze. McIntyre doubted the 24-hour figure on his tracker entry but called him healthy and settled.

Don's Friday verdict

Fridays are now the weekly review, and McIntyre's first one made a bold claim. Fewer than one in five GGR starters has historically finished. Studying this fleet, he said he could find little reason to doubt most of them.

Guillou, he said, is here for personal reasons, not prize money. Lawless sails as though the ocean were an old friend, much as Jean-Luc Van Den Heede did. Beskardes has sharpened his trim since the Mini Globe Race and is enjoying a podium place he never expected. Pinsky is doing the race by the book, without fuss, and Woodside is simply a seaman having a ball.

There were soft spots too. Rosli told McIntyre the storm was the first he had ever sailed through, and that he came out of it keen and better acquainted with Olleanna. Cantini, who feared his radio failure might end his race, has rigged an emergency aerial and carries on. Kerdelhué has gone quiet, sending short messages but declining calls and broadcasts for now, and McIntyre said he would keep trying to reach him. Messikommer rang race headquarters in a low state on Thursday and had talked himself round by Friday.

Life aboard

The skippers' Window Live broadcasts have become a race of their own, and a close record of what five weeks alone does to a person.

Messikommer spent Thursday reading from the diary he has kept since the start, in French and without a filter. The heat has turned his Swiss cheese into lumps floating in oil, a fondue in reverse. What hurts most, he admitted, is picturing the leaders sailing away while he sits in the calms. He rang Don, spent an hour and a half on the radio with another skipper, and read out a short poem of the doldrums that ended by begging the wind to blow. Then he closed with a firmer message: he is not stopping, he wants to be back at Les Sables in front of the people who waved him off, and he is leaning on Bob Marley and a Notre-Dame de Paris cassette to get through the afternoons. He sent kisses to his partner, Eloise, and promised a young fan he would look out for whales.

Mara Kveseth is working through the Harry Potter books on air, finishing Goblet of Fire on Thursday and recalling how she once devoured each new one in English first and again in Norwegian later. She trains on a fixed weekly plan, strength work on repeat and yoga every night, and she has been drawing her own close-up charts for dead reckoning because her passage chart is too coarse to plot a decent position. A research vessel and another ship called her on the radio to check she was well, and the positions they passed on put her further west than she had reckoned. She corrected her sums and carried on. At about three degrees north she is still working her way out of the doldrums, and she wants a bit more south in the wind so she clears Fernando de Noronha.

Gunnar Christensen had the hardest day. Gonzalo pushed him east more than two weeks ago, and he has not been able to get back west since. The trades he was counting on have not arrived. He spent the night in the cockpit under squalls with a double-reefed main and a part-furled jib, logged an 80-mile day and watched salt water finish off his microphones one by one. He could hear the Rustler 36s sailing away from him on the radio and said so, calling his own boat the old pumpkin with a good deal of affection. McIntyre noted that Christensen is a volunteer crew member at Teddington RNLI, whose supporters sent a station shirt and a donation to the race's charity. McIntyre wore it on air.

Ertan Beskardes turned in the longest and best-humoured recordings of the lot. He listens to the BBC World Service every evening and wonders at how much of it is football. He has drunk all his beer and his cider. He keeps three kinds of charger running for the satellite phone, tracker and head torches, sprays every contact against rust, and was caught by McIntyre wearing two head torches at once. He takes his noon sight in the cockpit and admitted it is a good deal harder on a moving boat than it looks.

A length of line on his Hydrovane, tied by Van Den Heede on the way home from the 2018 race, is still in place. Miss Beagle is the former Matmut, and Beskardes has left the rope alone as a keepsake. By his count 16 boats remain in the race and 15 are racing, attrition far lighter than usual this far out. He said he had not heard from Kerdelhué or Rosli on the radio for a while. He expects to reach Trindade next Thursday or Friday, was abeam of Natal as he spoke and has Recife next, and asked viewers to email the marina staff there who hosted the Mini Globe Race fleet, to say a former guest is passing offshore.

Between sail changes he told stories. In September 1979 he arrived in England as a 17-year-old, riding from Istanbul with a troupe of entertainers in a Ford Transit, then through Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Germany, and finally across the Channel by ferry. He spoke three words of English: yes, no and I love you. Passport control at Dover held him so long he missed every train but the last. At the Oxford language school on a Saturday morning he found the door locked and the whole town shut, until a kind stranger found him a bed and breakfast. He has loved Oxford ever since, Somertown and Woodstock Road above all.

What next

Guillou will be back under way, with the trades a few hundred miles south of him. The questions for the coming fortnight are whether Lawless can use the same wind to close the gap, and whether Beskardes can hold third against Lodolo. The back of the fleet needs wind more than anything, and McIntyre says it is coming.

He also opened an auction this week for one of eight signed canvas race posters, with a 300 euro reserve going to the race's charity and bids taken in the YouTube and Facebook comments. And 30 would-be entrants have already registered interest in the 2030 race, with just one woman among them so far.