Pat Lawless Retires From the Golden Globe Race After Solent Stay Fails

Pat Lawless has pulled out of the 2026 Golden Globe Race. The 70-year-old Irishman, the oldest skipper in the fleet and the man closest on Damien Guillou's tail, sent a satellite message late on 17 October saying his Solent rig had broken and he was out of the game. Silvermines Hydro is safe, Lawless is unhurt, and he is now sailing north.

The text landed at 23:51 UTC. Nobody saw it until the 04:00 tracker update on 18 October showed his boat heading the wrong way. "Pat here. Solent rig broken. Rig okay. Now sailing north. Out of the game." Race chairman Don McIntyre called it typical of the man: no fuss, no call for help.

McIntyre later spoke to Lawless by satellite phone, live on Sunday's tracker broadcast, and the picture is clearer. The Solent is a second headsail stay set just behind the main forestay, and it failed at the bottom, where the wire meets the furling gear. The fitting broke outright and cannot be mended. The chainplate is fine. With the sail and loose end flailing outside the rail in 25 to 30 knots and a solid sea, Lawless had to bring the boat round to haul it all back aboard. He got the sail off, lashed the assembly to the bow, and is now carrying a reefed main and a scrap of genoa.

He was about 2,000 miles west of Cape Town in the Roaring Forties, 5,644 miles into the race and a little over 100 behind Guillou. McIntyre said Lawless had no idea the gap was so small and had assumed the Frenchman was far ahead. A few weeks earlier he had damaged and repaired the same stay, climbing the mast to do it. Whether that repair played any part is not yet known.

North, not Cape Town

Lawless told McIntyre he will keep going north, out of the strong winds, round the South Atlantic high and up toward the Cape Verde Islands or the Canaries. That is about a month at sea. He has half suggested he might leave the boat there and fly home, though that is a long way off. He can't get up the mast for two or three days, and with the boat secure he feels no urgency.

McIntyre does not expect him to enter the Chichester Class, and the reason goes back to 2022. That year Lawless retired in Cape Town over a small failed bearing in his Aries windvane, a part a local engineer could have remade within 18 hours. He declined, because a Chichester finish was never the point. He has said this was his last attempt, after eight years of preparation. McIntyre noted that Jean-Luc Van Den Heede won the 2018 race at 73. For now Lawless is not officially retired, because a skipper stays in until he reaches port.

He is free to use his satellite phone, and McIntyre is sending him three-day forecasts. Earlier in the week McIntyre had reported that both of Lawless's radio sets were still playing up. He has also asked followers to support the fundraising page Lawless has been running.

The fleet reacts

News travelled fast. It reached the other skippers within hours, first on YB3 messages and then over the HF radio, and the replies on the Window Live broadcasts were warm.

Ertan Beskardes called Lawless by far the most popular entrant in the race and said the two at the front had put on a lovely fight. He raised a beer to him on air, partly because the boat was safe. He reckoned the fault must lie near the masthead, but he had no doubt Lawless could fix it, and he thought the Canaries the easiest place to leave a boat. The race has now lost Lawless and Selim Yalcin and still has 14 on the water, which he called a success story. Nothing in this race ever surprises him, he said. Four years of preparation can come down to one small nut or bolt.

Mara Kveseth, back on the broadcasts, said the news broke her heart. She and Lawless sail the same type of boat, and he had been a generous source of advice on the radio, something like a grandfather to the fleet. She gave her own boat an extra going-over afterward. It looked perfect, she said, but that is what Lawless would have thought about his.

Gunnar Christensen saw it differently. He wished Lawless would soldier on in the Chichester Class, since a finish there would still be epic and the race needs a character like him. Christensen has helped build Solent-rigged boats and could not see why Lawless wouldn't run off his headstay and make for Cape Town. The long haul to Cape Verde puzzled him, though he allowed that you never know a skipper's reasons.

Guillou on his own

Guillou now leads with no boat within 600 miles on the table. Sunday's review had him running into a fast swing from north-east to north-west, with 25 knots forecast, stronger gusts and a confused sea. McIntyre expects the worst to pass by Monday, with quick downwind sailing to follow. The Frenchman has also been fixing a problem of his own. One main halyard chafed through at the masthead and another was following, so he has rigged three, one of them over an external block, to save himself a climb in the Southern Ocean.

Behind the leader

Beskardes in Miss Beagle is the highest placed boat still racing. At Sunday's 08:00 UTC review he was making 6.3 knots after a 149-mile day. Andrea Lodolo's BiBi has rounded Trindade and was doing 6.9. McIntyre expects both to run from north-west winds into a soft south-westerly and then to rattle along in the sixes and sevens for some time. Daniel Pinsky's Exodus was on 6.2.

The 20:00 UTC table has Guillou 20,890 miles from the finish, an estimated landfall on 25 March, with Beskardes on 21,506, Lodolo on 21,694 and Pinsky on 21,884. Lawless still appears with a negative day, which is simply the tracker catching his turn. The route beyond Trindade has been redrawn more than once, so treat those gaps as indicative. Distance sailed is the better check.

Behind them the fleet is bunched. From Mara Kveseth's Showgirl to Christensen's Pompoen, eight boats sit inside a 330-mile band. Henry Wootton had the best day at 169 miles, and Matt Woodside was making 7.6 knots. Louis Kerdelhué's IE Charge was doing 4.2 knots toward Recife in Brazil, where he will stop for repairs and move into the Chichester Class. Guy deBoer, in that class too, was almost through the Doldrums at 2.7 knots and about 150 miles from the trade winds.

Race management has also eased Kveseth's penalty for her satellite phone calls. The 16-day total is cut to ten days to be served, with six suspended and open to reinstatement if she breaks the race rules or the broadcast code of conduct. Her Window Live access is back, and she was on air by Sunday evening. Her tracker is still showing an old position, and race management is looking into it.

Beskardes sights Trindade

Beskardes gave the most vivid account of the week. On Thursday he crept toward Trindade under a borrowed spinnaker, Jean-Luc Van Den Heede's own sail from the 2018 race, flown as a makeshift code zero with the pole at the end of its track. He has a second, brand-new spinnaker aboard, but it is covered in stickers, noisy and a third bigger in volume, and he won't use it again unless he has to.

On the live stream he turned the afternoon into a navigation lesson. He took a noon sun sight with his sextant, worked the sheet aloud through index error, dip and the sun's lower limb, added the declination and came out at 19 degrees 58 minutes south. He reckoned he was within five to ten miles of the truth and 30 miles off the island. At 14:33 he logged it, two rocks on the horizon, and opened a beer. His sight had been good. He called the island on VHF, as he had in 2022, and got no reply, as he had in 2022.

A day later it was still in view, because the wind kept letting go. The kite went up and down six times in 12 hours. Next on his chart is Tristan da Cunha, about 1,200 miles and nine or ten days away, with the 45 degrees south exclusion line beyond it.

By Sunday the Atlantic had turned rough. He was surfing at double figures in steep waves that had the boat on its ear, and after two reefs he settled on three in the main. Miss Beagle was making about six knots on the run line to Tristan, good for 130 to 140 miles a day, and he said he would rather go the right way at six than the wrong way fast. He had slipped 20 to 30 miles to the wrong side of that line the day before and wanted no repeat. With more sail the boat would do eight, but the Hydrovane couldn't cope with the seas.

The pumpkin and the pilot whales

Christensen is having a different Atlantic aboard Pompoen, which he calls the pumpkin. Hard, close-hauled sailing left his galley wet from a leaking deck seam, and the dry cupboard no longer dry, so he lived on freeze-dried meals until the wind eased onto a beam reach. He will seal the seam once the deck dries. By Friday morning he was making six knots under a reefed main and heading for a 150-mile day, with plans to boil the last of the potatoes from Les Sables d'Olonne and build a burrito.

A pod of pilot whales swam past the bow while he was on air, and flying fish had been landing on deck all week, one leaving its scales on the Hydrovane. His cassette tapes are starting to fail, so it has been Sgt. Pepper and some bossa nova, with Brazil so close. Somewhere in the forward lockers is a set of Patrick O'Brian novels.

He is thinking about the long game too. A radio chat with Wootton gave him hope that the two Cape George boats are not rocketing away, since heavy boats like his come into their own further south. He has traced a dodgy engine connection to a fuse link and plans to rewire it, partly so he can motor the last miles into Hobart if the wind dies.

What comes next

The race has lost Guillou's most dangerous rival just as the weather turns serious. With Lawless gone, the contest for the podium sits behind Guillou, and Beskardes, Lodolo and Pinsky are the three to watch.

Our earlier reports cover how the fleet reached the trades and the weather squeeze at Trindade, and our skipper profiles introduce the whole fleet.