The seven IMOCA crews taking part in The Ocean Race Europe 2025 spent their first night at sea on the race's fifth and final offshore stage picking their way through frustratingly light Mediterranean breezes along the Italian and French coastlines. The passage runs from Genova, Italy to Boka Bay in Montenegro and covers 1,600 nautical miles in total.
Drifting conditions set the tone from the moment the fleet lined up in close formation for yesterday afternoon's start. The planned route takes the boats down the western side of Corsica and Sardinia, past the southern tip of Sicily, out to a virtual waypoint near Greece, and then north through the Adriatic Sea toward Boka Bay. Getting there in any sort of timely fashion, however, requires wind that has so far refused to cooperate.
Rather than making progress south, the yachts spent the hours of darkness edging westward toward Nice, France, the city that hosted the stopover between the third and fourth legs of the race. The strategy was straightforward: chase the cool northerly breezes that drain off the land at night. A brief window around 2100 CEST brought the fleet through 10 knots on occasion, but those gains were short-lived. For most of the night, crews were constantly swapping between Code Zero headsails and masthead spinnakers as they chased and then lost pockets of pressure, with every team making gains and losses at various points.
Canada Ocean Racing – Be Water Positive co-skipper Pip Hare summed up the night. "We're kind of creeping down the coast here in little pockets of wind and it's a bit like Wacky Races," she said. "Sometimes you take off, sometimes you don't – sometimes you go in a hole.
"It's a thermal effect. It's been really hot here and at night time the air cools and it gets heavier and it kind of tumbles down the valleys and out to sea. We are making the most of that effect."
The conditions were a long way from what these foiling boats are built for. When the breeze fills in and an IMOCA is skimming across the water at full speed, the crew are tucked inside enclosed cockpits with the boat doing big numbers and water flying everywhere. Drifting along a sun-warmed coastline is another world entirely.
Nico Lunven, sailing aboard Team Holcim - PRB, kept things in perspective. "At least we are moving," he said. "The fleet is not totally stopped and we are moving in the right direction, which is nice. It's such different conditions to when you have some wind and you are locked inside the cockpit, with the boat doing 25 knots and plenty of water everywhere."
One unexpected reward of the calm night was the view overhead. A clearing sky gave the fleet a front-row seat to a 'Blood Moon' lunar eclipse, with the Earth passing directly between the sun and the moon and casting its shadow across the lunar surface. Holcim – PRB skipper Rosalin Kuiper (NED) took a moment to look up. "It's beautiful and the eclipse is disappearing so you can see the moon appearing bit by bit," she said. "It's very pretty, very beautiful, and there are a lot of stars." With that, she switched on her head torch and returned to checking the trim of her boat's headsail.
By early Monday afternoon CEST, the fleet had bunched together again in a wind hole to the southeast of Nice. Paprec Arkéa was showing at the top of the PredictWind tracker at that point, though with a dozen miles separating the entire fleet, the Leg 5 standings will remain unreliable until a proper bout of fresh breeze arrives. That is expected sometime this evening or overnight.
