Five days into The Ocean Race Atlantic, the fleet has been battered into a shape nobody saw coming.
Team Malizia, out front for so long, has slipped to fourth after a knock to their port foil overnight on Friday. Nearly 100 miles further east, Team Francesca Clapcich powered by 11th Hour Racing has taken over at the top and stretched their lead over United by the Ocean, now second, out to 25 miles.
They can't ease off, though. DMG MORI Sailing Team, in third, is closing fast and sits just 10 miles behind United by the Ocean. A high-pressure bubble is building off the Azores, threatening to squeeze the fleet back together just as the front-runners were starting to break clear.
Crews have spent hour after hour braced in the cockpit, absorbing slamming and violent impacts, running purely on resilience.
Almost 1,500 miles into the race, the fleet has been tested hard by strong winds, heavy seas, and the sense of being pushed to the absolute limit.
Yesterday's Onboard Live broadcast, which airs daily from 5:00 to 5:30pm, made that plain. Reporters struggled to get coherent answers from skippers who were visibly worn down.
"We try to sleep whenever we can, but it's impossible," admitted Sara Stone of United by the Ocean.
"It's constantly slamming and it's so noisy," said Samantha Davies aboard DMG MORI Global One.
"We're all exhausted, tired and stressed," said Oliver Heer of Embrace the Challenge. "These boats are incredibly difficult to sail, and to live on."
Heer's team had it worse than most this morning. Embrace the Challenge suffered a serious tear in its mainsail overnight while trying to reef in 30 knots of wind. The boat and crew are stable but slower, waiting on first light to assess the damage and begin repairs.
Fighting spirit hasn't dimmed anywhere in the fleet.
That's been clearest aboard Malizia 4. Boris Herrmann's crew damaged their port foil and had a technical issue with the keel ram, yet refused to fold. They secured both problems, got back underway, and are still sailing fast roughly 100 miles off the lead.
DMG MORI Sailing Team is showing the same resolve. Sitting behind the two frontrunners, Kojiro Shiraishi's crew claimed yesterday's "Super Sprint", the daily race-within-the-race rewarding the fastest team over a 20-minute window, for their first win of the event.
The new boat is clearly finding its feet in tough conditions. More pressingly for United by the Ocean, that gap is now under 10 miles and shrinking.
But the boat catching every eye on day five is 11th Hour Racing.
Francesca Clapcich and her crew seized control of the race yesterday and haven't let go since. This morning they held a 25-mile buffer over United by the Ocean, and they're sailing quicker too, averaging 24 knots over the past four hours compared with 21.5 knots for Paul Meilhat's crew.
Spirits on board stayed high despite the conditions. "We've been through every emotion, but we're going to keep fighting," Clapcich said. "We believe in the boat."
Now the clock starts working against the leaders. In roughly ten hours the wind is due to ease as that high-pressure bubble builds, and DMG MORI's Nicolas Lunven has already flagged the chance of the fleet "bunching back together".
Could the whole order flip again? Quite possibly.
One thing is certain: in The Ocean Race Atlantic, nothing is decided yet.
