Pat Lawless has Damien Guillou back in range. Race chairman Don McIntyre had the gap at about 70 nautical miles on Wednesday, and both men have now sailed out of the following wind that carried them down the Atlantic. Ahead of them is a patch of headwinds, squalls and building sea.
At 08:00 UTC on Thursday, Guillou's Solarem had 21,268 miles to sail and Lawless's Silvermines Hydro 21,321, a gap of 53 miles on distance to finish. The two numbers disagree partly because the tracker's course beyond Trindade has been redrawn more than once. The speeds are the better guide. Guillou had slowed to about 4.7 knots on Wednesday, good for 88 miles in the day, and was heading south on port tack with the air cool enough to send him hunting for warmer clothes. Lawless was making 5.2. He had kept the fair breeze longer and was only now running into the same mess.
Golden Globe Race 2026: distance sailed
Tracker snapshots, start to Day 34
Source: Golden Globe Race live tracker (Yellow Brick)
A shift from south-east toward south should let both boats tack east. Then the high behind it will probably swing round and push them back toward the north-east. Lawless is doing this without much help from ashore. McIntyre said his latest message to race management called the radio "kaput", with no transmissions and very poor reception, so he is probably working without weather reports. And McIntyre expects worse to come. The Southern Ocean means three or four months of "quite dramatic weather".
Chasers slow, then bunch
Third-placed Ertan Beskardes on Miss Beagle meets the new high first. On Wednesday he was down to 2.9 knots after a 116-mile day, with McIntyre expecting him to stop within hours. By Thursday's fix he had 22,173 miles to go. That should let Andrea Lodolo on BiBi, fourth, claw back a deficit of around 300 miles, perhaps to between 150 and 180, before both escape. Lodolo is sailing into lighter air himself, so the gain may not last.
Daniel Pinsky on Exodus was on 5.3 knots, with a day of decent breeze left, and was due to make his first school call. Guido Cantini's Hannah of Cowes topped Tuesday's daily board with 160 miles, and his 7.1 knots was the fastest four-hour leg. Étienne Messikommer's Bernard was making 6.1 knots, although the 350-mile day on the board was flagged as a mistake. Isa Rosli's Olleanna was on 4.3 knots and may find a useful change of wind angle as the high drifts east. Gunnar Christensen's Pompoen made 136 miles at 5.8 knots, and Pär Nyman's Lazy Otter 112.
Matt Woodside's Tipi Haere and Mara Kveseth's Showgirl both have stale positions, so no one can say how close Woodside is to Nyman. McIntyre suspects they are a good deal nearer than the dots show. Guy deBoer, in the Chichester Class, was making 4.5 knots as he ran into the Doldrums.
Louis Kerdelhué's IE Charge is still all but stopped, at 1.1 knots on Wednesday and 16 miles in the 24 hours to Thursday's fix. McIntyre listed three problems aboard. The main water tank is contaminated and unusable, though he has other containers. Something has failed in the furling or reefing gear, which means repeated trips to the foredeck. And the end of a spinnaker pole is smashed. Our earlier report has the background.
Kveseth and the satellite phone
Race management is counting Mara Kveseth's satellite phone conversation of 11 October as six calls and six penalties. Asked on Wednesday's broadcast whether five dropouts and instant redials should count as one, McIntyre was flat. "No, it was six calls," he said. "Every time they redialed, right, it's another phone call."
He pointed to the Notice of Race, which allows an entrant to seek a dispensation in advance. A skipper expecting a bad line can ask for instant redials on one subject to count as one call. McIntyre said nobody on Kveseth's side asked, and nobody told race management about the call. The SIM cards are supplied by the race and sealed into the phones, and he said the account records show it. "It was six phone calls," he said. "So it's six penalties."
On Tuesday he gave the scale: 24 hours for an unauthorised satellite call, "and every subsequent call is 72 hours". No total has been announced. Kveseth is aware of the penalties, McIntyre said, though he did not know how she would respond.
The matter is part of a wider discussion with her and her manager, and McIntyre says a fuller public account will follow once it is settled. Race management looked at removing her and decided against it. "We have no intention of kicking Mara out of the race," he said. Her live broadcast stays off the air until the issue is resolved. Earlier this month Cantini accepted a 24-hour penalty over a radio matter, so the race has handed out this kind of penalty before.
Her tracker is also stuck on an old position. McIntyre puts her about 20 miles ahead of the dot, doing around 4.9 knots on a western route that may find a corridor of breeze while boats farther east slow. The race is considering switching the public feed to her backup unit.
Life on board
On Bernard, Messikommer had a good day for small things. He washed his hair, took what he called a huge shower, changed his sheets and cooked spinach to make up for a few lazy days without vegetables. His beard is curling and itching. Trindade is about 780 miles away and he is covering around 140 a day.
He is writing as he goes. One piece he read out was a comic essay on marine toilets, which he calls an essential luxury, with an Aegean olive stone as the villain. Another, "The Boat Library", is named for the library bus that visited his school yard. About 200 books are aboard, among them Les Misérables and Bernard Moitessier, and he said Daniel Pinsky had planned on one a week and was getting through one a day. The gas is less cheerful news. One of his four second-hand bottles is nearly gone after 30 days, and two he thought were almost new were well used, so he is rationing hot drinks for ten days to save fuel for the Southern Ocean. He has counted 105 photos sent in by followers so far, and said he was glad to see the faces.
Beskardes spent Wednesday night in light air with a 70-square-metre spinnaker up, a mug of tea and French chocolate digestives, and a running conversation with his Hydrovane. When the boat held its course he praised it. When it wandered he told it off. He has been losing 50 to 70 miles a day, and his noon sight put him within about five miles of his true position. He hopes to reach 20 degrees south by about 2pm on Thursday, and to glimpse Trindade by six, though he reckons it will slip past in the dark. The nearest boat to him is Lodolo's BiBi, which no longer comes up on the radio.
Later he turned to the harder side of the race. Missing his wife and family, he said, is the cruel part, and the reason so many entrants retire in the first months. He told the story of delivering the family's cruising boat from Swansea to Lymington in a January sleet storm, steering by hand because the autopilot had been wired backwards, sheltering from a gale warning in Salcombe, and sweeping through the Needles at night on the flood. Lymington, he says, is still the best marina in the country. It is also, he believes, where Gunnar Christensen keeps Pompoen.
Looking ahead
The next 48 hours belong to the two leaders. Lawless is closing, but both face the same weather, so the gap will depend on which side of each pressure change they land. McIntyre noted that at this pace they could reach Hobart in early December, well ahead of the 20 December Guillou originally guessed. Our previous report covers the squeeze that led here, and our skipper profiles introduce the whole fleet.
