Ireland's Pat Lawless, second and closing on leader Damien Guillou, has retired from the 2026 McIntyre Golden Globe Race after a serious failure in the Solent rig on Silvermines Hydro in the South Atlantic. He is unhurt and, in his own words, the rig is okay
Pat Lawless's second attempt at the Golden Globe Race ended with a text message. At 23:51 UTC on Saturday 17 October, about 12.51pm on Sunday in New Zealand, the 70-year-old Irishman sent race control 14 words from Silvermines Hydro: "Pat here. Solent rig broken. Rig okay. Now sailing north. Out of the game."
It ended a long chase. By the race's reckoning Solarem, Damien Guillou's Rustler 36, was only a little over 100 nautical miles ahead, with Silvermines Hydro deep in the Roaring Forties some 2,000 miles west of Cape Town. Lawless was sailing into a north-easterly headwind of 20 to 25 knots, with the sea running at three to four metres.
What broke
Silvermines Hydro is a Saltram Saga 36 cutter. Lawless has described its sail plan to his sailmaker Rolly Tasker Sails as three furling headsails: a genoa forward, a Solent yankee inside it and a staysail. The Solent stay is the middle of the three, a secondary forestay set just aft of the genoa forestay, and on this boat it carries a reefing headsail. Lawless added it before the 2022 race, and had new sails and rigging for this edition.
This wasn't the first problem with the Solent rig in this race. He found damage to the Solent forestay a few weeks back and fixed it himself at sea. We are yet to learn whether that fix has now given way or another part of the Solent rig has failed; the cause is still unknown.
The genoa and staysail forestays are still in place, and it seems the rest of the standing rigging is intact, and the mast is not in danger.
How the news got out
Race control didn't see the text straight away. It came in at around 1.51am in France, just after the night's routine monitoring had wrapped up, and only came to light after the 04:00 UTC tracker update showed Silvermines Hydro well off her course and heading slowly north-west. Organisers note that had Lawless felt in danger, a call to the race's emergency number would have brought an immediate response. His shore manager, keeping an eye on the same tracker, had no extra word from him either.
With no injury reported, no call for help and his message saying the rig was okay, the race has not declared a Code Orange, the alert it came close to issuing for Louis Kerdelhué earlier this month.
Retiring also lifts the satellite phone restrictions on racing skippers, the rules that saw Mara Kveseth penalised for six calls on 11 October. Even so, when the race put out its statement on Sunday he still hadn't been in touch.
Lawless hasn't said what he is doing now. His track suggests he may be hove-to or otherwise keeping the boat easy until daylight lets him look at the damage, and making the rig safe will come first. Race organisers think Cape Town would be a reasonable destination once that's done, but stresses he has given no indication of where he is going. Earlier in the week race chairman Don McIntyre said Lawless's latest message had described his radio as "kaput", so he is probably working all this out without weather reports.
West of Cape Town, again
It is the second Golden Globe that Lawless has lost in the South Atlantic. In 2022, on the same boat under its old name Green Rebel, he was in the leading pack when a bearing bush in his Aries windvane self-steering came out of its socket and disengaged the gear. He had no spare, and the fix was an engineering job he couldn't do at sea. He sailed into Cape Town steering sheet to tiller and retired on 10 November 2022. He could have repaired the gear and continued in the one-stop Chichester Class, but did not want to. "If this had happened in Hobart, I would have continued, but not here," he said at the time.
He came back calling it unfinished business, with the aim of becoming the first Irish sailor to complete the Golden Globe solo and non-stop. He turned 70 in May, the age at which his father, also Pat, completed his own solo circumnavigation in 1996.
This time he and Guillou broke clear of the fleet through the Doldrums and into the south-east trades. Lawless shrugged off a windvane steering-line failure in early October that, by the race's account, had him hanging off the stern for about 90 minutes, and since Guillou's Trindade stop he had been steadily cutting into the lead.
Guillou out in front
Guillou now has a big lead over the rest of the racing fleet. At 08:00 UTC on Thursday 15 October, third-placed Ertan Beskardes on Miss Beagle was 905 nautical miles further from the finish than Solarem on the race tracker.
Guillou knows this side of the race too. In 2022 he also retired into Cape Town after a windvane failure, days after Lawless.
For now, race control is monitoring Silvermines Hydro and waiting for Lawless to say where he is heading.
