Guillou's coastal gamble pays off again as the chasing pack refuses to break

Damien Guillou's lead over Pat Lawless has grown to somewhere between 95 and 100 nautical miles. Race founder Don McIntyre, walking through the tracker on Sunday's briefing, pointed to Guillou's decision to stay tight against the coast as the boats worked south of the Canaries, close enough to pick up the daily land and sea breeze cycle that builds along a coastline as hot land and cooler ocean trade places through the day. It's the kind of local knowledge a weather router would flag for the opening week of a race like this, and McIntyre reckons Guillou likely carried printed forecasts for exactly this stretch before he ever left Les Sables-d'Olonne, the same approach Jean-Luc Van Den Heede used with a professional router ahead of his 2018 win. Nobody's confirmed it. It's a reasonable guess from someone who's watched enough of these races to know the difference.

Behind the top two, the group fighting for third has settled into a standoff rather than a race. Andrea Lodolo, Guido Cantini, Etienne Messikommer and Daniel Pinsky are within hours of each other rather than days, and McIntyre's read on it is that nobody in that pack is trying to beat the others outright, they're waiting for someone to make a mistake so they can sail through the gap. Messikommer has the edge for now, pulling three miles clear of Pinsky after the pair were reportedly close enough at one point to call across to each other. Ertan Beskardes and Louis Kerdelhué sit not far behind, both still very much in touch.

Kerdelhué's week took a genuine scare earlier on, when IE Charge was spotted with sails flogging and nobody visible on deck, and reported to local authorities as adrift and not under command. He'd simply been below at the time. He's since climbed his own mast to sort out the spinnaker problem that caused it and is back among the chasing pack with no lasting damage, one of a few skippers this week who've had a pointed reminder of how quickly solo sail-handling can look far more serious than it is when there's no one to ask what's actually going on.

Henry Wootton had the roughest day in the fleet, just 46 nautical miles, and it traces straight back to a routing call. He took the eastern side of the Canaries rather than the west, and sailed into a windless pocket that cost him the better part of a day while boats further west kept moving. It's the same pattern that's shown up more than once already this race: go east around these islands, and there's a real chance you pay for it.

Further back, Pär Nyman's approach to Lanzarote has turned into a race against the clock. He's down to around 167 nautical miles to run aboard Lazy Otter, but the forecast has him parking in a dead patch by Sunday afternoon before the breeze returns, weakly, over the following two days. McIntyre's team has already pushed their own flights out once to wait for him and admits there's a real chance they'll miss his arrival altogether depending on how the next 48 hours play out.

Selim Yalçin remains the fleet's outlier. His HF radio failure has Help Disabled Children beating north against the wind, funnelling hard out of the Strait of Gibraltar, a slow, grinding passage toward Cádiz that could take several more days before he's able to get the antenna tuner replaced and rejoin the race, in Chichester Class, further behind than ever. Guy deBoer, meanwhile, is settled at Marina Rubicón trying to raise roughly US$10,000 for the structural repair to Spirit, with a repair team lined up and ready to move as soon as the funding's in place.

The wider Atlantic weather picture shows a more organised system building well offshore to the west of the fleet, distinct from the loose, scattered patterns that have dominated the first two weeks. For now it's sitting clear of the boats.