Four hours of alarm. That was the toll of Ian Lipinski's nap gone wrong, a stretch so far from the 20-minute doze he jokes about telling visitors back in Saint-Malo that it reads like the start of a confession. The Frenchman, racing Crédit Mutuel in the Route du Rhum, has turned to his onboard diary to make sense of a crossing that has given him plenty to think about.
"I wake up with a feeling I know well: I've slept too much!" Lipinski wrote. "The alarm's been screaming, for how long? I turn it off... it's still going! It's a different alarm... the battery voltage... I really must have slept a lot. The wind is light, I'm not carrying the right sail. I'd hesitated about putting up the big spi before the nap... No point rushing anyway, that's just how it is."
A quick glance at the chart told him he hadn't turned around, at least. Small mercies.
There was a darker moment too. Lipinski described the stress of hearing that Benoît Sineau, racing Ekinox Rhétorès, had triggered his distress beacon, an alert that had race management launch rescue procedures within minutes. Jules Bonnier, sailing Plastic Odyssey, diverted and picked him up just before nightfall.
"What efficiency from Jules!" Lipinski wrote. "Going to recover someone in the wind and sea conditions we had, that can't have been simple. Admiration! I hope Benoit wasn't too badly shaken, we're waiting to hear his account of events."
Then came the flooding. A wave got into the boat through the lower hatch, soaking much of his gear and his galley. Worse was the sound of the deck creaking in 40 knots of wind, hours spent wondering whether something was about to give, before it turned out to be nothing more than a loose strap on a bag, slapping in the wind. "The first signs of real fatigue, surely," he admitted.
On strategy, Lipinski was blunt: his northern route gamble hasn't paid off. A shifting depression forced him to divert far wider than planned, at one stage pointing almost at Newfoundland. A full day was lost becalmed near the centre of the low with Italian and Czech rivals, in confused, violent seas.
He doesn't fully regret the attempt. There's plenty of race left, he says, even if the average winds remain light.
A quieter note closed the update. Lipinski's thoughts turned to those forced out of the race, some in serious or painful circumstances, amid a run of breakages, capsizes and injuries that has already claimed competitors such as Alexis Thomas, whose rudder damage ended his solo campaign just three days into the race. "Tonight I'm wondering about the meaning of all this," he wrote.
