Kerdelhué sails again after a near code orange as Cantini loses his radio

Louis Kerdelhué is sailing again, having made 80 miles in the 24 hours to Tuesday evening, after race founder Don McIntyre came within one position report of declaring a code orange. IE Charge had barely moved for a day and her skipper had sent no daily message. By Monday's 16:00 UTC report the picture, a boat drifting in fair weather, looked to McIntyre like a sailor who might be hurt or overboard. He held off, decided to wait for the 20:00 UTC report, and had the crisis log and situation reports ready. A code orange is the point at which the race tells the French rescue coordination centre at Gris-Nez that it is worried. It is not a distress call, and he would have asked for no action before daylight. By Tuesday morning Kerdelhué was making 3.8 knots.

McIntyre was fond of the skipper. His own strongest memory of the race so far, he said, is Kerdelhué arriving late to a press conference at Les Sables d'Olonne, climbing in through a window at the back of the room and falling into the display. "I wasn't doing anything like this when I was 21," he added. The race has also issued its first fine for missed daily messages: €50 a day for Kerdelhué, invoiced to his team, which has 30 days to pay. "Louis, contact us," McIntyre said.

Guido Cantini's radio is dead. The main set on Hannah of Cowes has been finished by water ingress, McIntyre said, not by the burnt-out antenna tuner described a day earlier. The sets are meant to be watertight, but a sealed radio can't breathe, so skippers open them to use them and are supposed to close them up before bad weather. Cantini relies on his radio more than anyone in the fleet, in the race founder's view. A second satellite call would cost him 72 hours, and a stop in Cape Town for repairs would take him into the Chichester Class.

Guy deBoer is racing again in that class, outside the rankings. He sailed round the back of Lanzarote, past the rocks where Spirit went aground last month, which the race founder called a big psychological boost, and made 64 miles at four knots on his first stretch at sea. There is no fuel limit in the Chichester Class, so he can motor through the Doldrums and keep diesel in hand for Tasmania.

Damien Guillou made 151 nautical miles in the 24 hours to Tuesday evening aboard Solarem and Pat Lawless 137 on Silvermines Hydro, leaving 248 miles between them. Guillou is 216 miles from Trindade. The pair are about two days from the turning point, where the centre of the South Atlantic high is moving east and a new one is forming behind it, and the handover of breeze will decide who gains. The forecast runs McIntyre showed range from headwinds to a clear run south. Whatever happens, the middle of the fleet is some 1,300 miles back, and something dramatic would have to happen for anyone to catch these two.

Ertan Beskardes is third on Miss Beagle, with the best run behind the leaders, 128 miles, and a 188-mile lead over Andrea Lodolo in fourth. His own sextant fix on Tuesday put him at one degree north, 27 west, about 60 miles short of the equator. McIntyre expects him to keep his breeze while a new hole of light air forms behind him, and Beskardes has promised a small bottle of fizz for the crossing, on his next broadcast at 21:30 UTC on Wednesday.

That hole is costing places. Etienne Messikommer, who asked his viewers to send him wind, was close to stationary, and the two-day forecast has him and Henry Wootton among the likely losers. Wootton managed 23 miles in 24 hours and Cantini 34. Pär Nyman, on the other hand, covered 103 miles in the day to Tuesday morning and was still doing 5.7 knots, though he is heading for the no-wind zone and may be about to have his first real taste of parking.

Helga Marie "Mara" Løvenskiold Kveseth dropped off the tracker after missing three position reports, a glitch cured, according to the race founder, by running a magnet in a circle around the top of the antenna. She was back for the evening report in sixth. He called her reading from Kirsten Neuschäfer's memoir on the Window "a classic", and set it against a 20-million-euro Imoca campaign. "That's what the GGR is about," he said.