Guillou threads the storm gap as Lodolo rides out 60 knots

Damien Guillou has come through the worst of the South Atlantic storm still leading the Golden Globe Race, and he did it by finding the one soft spot in a system that forecast models had once painted with gusts above 90 knots. Race chairman Don McIntyre reckoned Solarem was sitting in a gap in the weather on Monday, running under storm jib alone in a north-westerly of about 40 knots, gusting 60, with a sea of four to five metres. Nine-metre seas were still running a short way to the south. At 20:00 UTC the tracker had Guillou 20,141 nautical miles from the finish and 551 miles clear of Ertan Beskardes in Miss Beagle.

The detour had a price. Guillou made good 152 miles in the 24 hours to Monday evening and has now sailed 6,929 miles since Les Sables d'Olonne. McIntyre said steering well clear of the core of the low had cost Guillou some ground, but he called the trade worth making. Guillou's own message to race control was short: strong wind, storm jib only, everything fine. The wind was due to swing south-west within about 20 minutes of the transition, and McIntyre expected the sea to ease with it, though the biggest waves were still on their way when he spoke.

McIntyre walked viewers through the forecast screens he works from, stepping the model forward three hours at a time. The storm had tightened around a core to the south and loosened everywhere else, and that is what opened the gap. Models a few days earlier had shown gusts of 92 to 94 knots. By Monday they had eased to about 73 knots in the gusts and around 50 sustained. He added that the cloud picture suggested the model was struggling to pin down the wind right at the edge of the core, so nobody should treat the numbers as exact. Had Guillou not changed course when he did, McIntyre said, he would have been sailing under the heart of it.

Lodolo calls in from the far side

Andrea Lodolo in BiBi rang the race hotline once the worst had passed, and McIntyre played the recording on air. The Italian sounded delighted. He put the gusts at about 60 knots with a very heavy sea, reported no damage, and said he had already settled BiBi on a reach in a south-westerly of 25 to 30 knots and a four-metre swell. He had stood watch all night, trimming and adjusting like a sentry, and called it the sort of experience he came to the race for. He was not tired yet, he said. The adrenaline had to drain away first.

The tracker has him third, 20,816 miles from the finish and 675 behind Guillou. His 24-hour run of 98 miles shows what the night cost. A second low is now forming to the west of the fleet and Lodolo will meet it first. McIntyre has told him to expect something, though he has not given him numbers, and said he would only issue a formal warning to a skipper if the forecast went above 35 knots.

Behind the top three the table is tight. Kveseth, Messikommer, Pinsky, Cantini and Wootton hold fourth to eighth, and just 106 miles separate them, from 21,152 to 21,258 miles to go. Kveseth's position is a few hours older than the rest, but fourth place is a real contest, whatever Kveseth's intentions.

The halyards that let go in the dark

Gunnar Christensen, last of the racing fleet in Pompoen, spent the build-up to the storm on humbler jobs and talked his viewers through them on Window Live. Early on Sunday he noticed his unused halyards swinging loose. The cheap old line that held their working ends at the foot of the mast had chafed through, leaving halyards, topping lifts and pole lifts strewn across the deck and wrapped around everything. It took him more than an hour to untangle them at two in the morning, with 20 to 25 knots on the beam and waves coming aboard. He accepts he should have replaced the line himself. Each halyard now has a spot of its own. His bilge pump's float switch has also failed, so he runs the pump on a timer and relies on the high-water alarm to wake him, which it did that night.

By daylight he was dead downwind and in a better mood. The big job was lifting the long spinnaker pole off the mast, where it had sat since the Bay of Biscay, and putting two shorter poles in its place to hold out his Yankee headsails. One has a history. It came off Hamish McNamara's Contessa 35 and was sent to Les Sables d'Olonne when Mara Kveseth feared her own poles would not arrive in time. Hers did turn up, so Christensen took the spare. The staysail boom he pulls out on a preventer fills the gap when he goes wing and wing with the headsail, and he thinks he may be the only skipper in the fleet with one.

He describes himself as a cautious sailor, and the double-reefed main says as much. That caution is why he is at the back, he figures, and also why he expects to finish. He took a noon sight at 13:39 UTC through a gap in the cloud, got his fix and is steering south of east on a line that should carry him above Tristan da Cunha.

A radio schedule on 8 megahertz gave him better contact than he has had in days. He swapped positions and wind with Kveseth, Etienne Messikommer and Daniel Pinsky, who are a couple of hundred miles ahead, and chatted with Isa Rosli, who has spent days over the side scraping goose barnacles off Olleanna. From Cape Town, Jeremy Bagshaw, who sailed Olleanna round in the 2022 race, reads out forecasts and passes on messages from home. Christensen puts the low at about 1,400 miles across. The tropical storm that hit him earlier in the race was frightening enough, he says, and he would rather not meet many more.

Sunday evening was calmer. He played Pink Floyd's The Wall for the first time in years, remembered his time as a bassist in a London sixties covers band, and made pesto pasta from the garlic cloves that had survived the trip.

Kveseth wrestles a sticky furler

Mara Kveseth in Showgirl has been staying north to keep clear of the low, and she spent Sunday watching the barometer slide from 1,024 to 1,018 hectopascals as the wind walked round the compass, from south through east and north to north-west. She is dealing with a furler fault. The telescopic section of her furling foil has crept out because a retaining screw worked loose, and the genoa has become hard to furl. She plans to take the sail down soon, a swap she was due to make anyway, and fix the foil then. She slept badly, waking to check on the storm, and is enjoying the cooler nights now that she has her blanket out and a crochet kit she is trying to learn.

On the radio she had spent about an hour and a half talking with eight other skippers, among them Guillou, Pinsky, Henry Wootton, Messikommer, Lodolo, Rosli, Christensen and Matt Woodside. She says Guido Cantini is having HF trouble. The horse latitudes, she told viewers, throw up every kind of weather at once, and she is looking forward to the Southern Ocean, where lows at least arrive in an order. McIntyre noted that Kveseth has said publicly she is not racing. Her reasoning is that you have to be at the finish to win it.

Across the fleet

Etienne Messikommer is pushing hardest. He made good 161 miles in 24 hours, the best on the board, and was making 7.3 knots when McIntyre ran through the positions. In the early hours of Tuesday, New Zealand time, he was on the radio hailing a motor vessel about two miles off his starboard side as Bernard ran south-east at more than eight knots. Henry Wootton in Privateer is hunting him, and McIntyre expects a duel.

Guido Cantini made 159 miles in Hannah of Cowes and Pär Nyman 158 in Lazy Otter, with Nyman at 6.9 knots. Rosli made 149 in Olleanna, dragging barnacles he did not get to finish cleaning. Wootton added 145, Pinsky only 77 as the system passed over him, and Christensen 131. Guy deBoer in Spirit is reaching at between 6.2 and 6.8 knots after a quick trip through the doldrums, while Matt Woodside in Tipi Haere looks to be running out of breeze. Beskardes checked in on Sunday night to say conditions were too good to complain about, and was making 6.4 knots.

Pat Lawless is heading north hard on the wind at 3.7 knots, and our report on his retirement has the detail. Louis Kerdelhué is alongside in Recife with IE Charge. The tracker now lists him as retired, though McIntyre said on Monday he was still waiting to hear from him.

What to watch

The sea should ease for Guillou over the next day or two, but the next problem is already forming. A weaker low west of the fleet will reach Lodolo first, and McIntyre said it could still intensify. After that a large high rolls through on Thursday 29 October. The front-runners, Guillou, Lodolo and possibly Beskardes, may slip past it, while the middle of the fleet is more likely to meet light headwinds or a hole. Our previous report covers how the storm built.

Follow the whole race on our dedicated Golden Globe Race 2026 page.