But there has been little time to celebrate the new mark as the top group push hard to make the most of a low pressure system which is following the perfect axis to propel the towards the Southern Ocean. All are trying to stay with the system which is becoming narrower and narrower. With lighter winds either side it is increasingly a fast moving high wire act.
“It is a bit like in life, the rich get richer!" quipped 16th placed Romain Attanasio (Fortinet - Best Western) on the French Vendée Globe LIVE! show today. And indeed leaders Charlie Dalin and Thomas Ruyant are slowly but surely widening the gap on their pursuers. A few days ago at Fernando de Noronha the top ten was about sixty miles apart but now stretches to 273 nautical miles back to Briton Sam Davies (Initiatives Coeur) who still holds a good tenth.
K.I.S.S.ing works at speed
Davies said today, “The conditions have been really nice, it is just starting now to get a bit more sea state but recently the seas have been flat and so it has been easy to sail the boat fast and so we were not losing too much distance but for me I am little bit behind the leaders with a little bit less wind. I was actually struggling for power yesterday. Now it is back and we are full on. It is rich get richer and it has been for the last two days and so it is difficult to stay with them for sure. But I am in a good position to hang on to this breeze. So I have slightly less breeze. But it pretty good.”
You have to keep life very simple in these fast conditions. You have to be organised before we get south. Everything needs to be in the right place, near the nav seat. So you are not having to go out on deck. You are making small trim and course adjustments. When you are going fast there is not much else you can do.”
Rapid Ruyant reflects
And early this morning Ruyant, who is in second place about 45 miles behind Dalin, said, “We're not going fast just to break the record but especially to try to keep the best position with this depression, we don't know what the rest of this spell will bring but in any case if we can keep it as long as possible, it's good. On a downwind course I think I have a good machine, I'm getting used to it well, after Charlie and Yoann continue to go very fast, the rest of the fleet too, in the end there are still a bunch of boats quite close.”
He enthused, “I just had a spell at 32 knots there. But we live a life a little crouched, holding on, sitting, lying down, being extremely careful because the boat sometimes has movements and reactions that are a little bit unexpected because of the sea state, I feel like a small animal surviving in this hull that goes at Mach 12!”
“But surviving is going well, these are conditions that we will have for a while, this gybe is a long one so we still have a while like that, and after that it drops off in the South and in the end this bit is all good.”
Attanasio explained, “I try to stay in this depression for as long as possible. It’s not easy to follow its trajectory. The game at the moment is to stay with it. It seems to be soft behind us to windward and to leewards it we don’t really know, which means we don’t really want to set foot there,”
He is not overly worried as he said he should benefit from a "plan B", in this case the arrival of another small depression just behind.
"The Saint Helena high is reforming and will quickly pass in front of us. So we are not going to find ourselves trapped in the middle", explained Attanasio who, as others round him, would just have a short wait for the next low coming down the track.
Animal instincts
But behind them the daggerboard boats are going to follow a much more classical routing, a ‘triple whammy’ sailing slower, further and less direct than the top half of the fleet which has a gift of a routing.
"Today we find ourselves in a fairly "classic" situation. Not much is going to happen over the next three or four days, but at the end of the week there will be a slightly technical depression to catch. I think that at that point, we will be able to recover if we sail well,” promised French skipper Benjamin Ferré, who is starting to lose his sense of time on this his first Vendée Globe.
“At this stage of the race, we become a bit animal. As we start to no longer know how many days we have been out, we are adjusting to the sun. For my part, I feel like a lion cub in the savannah: during the day, as it is hot, I take naps and at night, I go hunting and I feed myself,” concluded the skipper of Monnoyeur – Duo for a Job who is 27th, 100 miles or so behind Jean Le Cam (Tout commence en Finistère-Armor lux) who is first daggerboard boat and who mentored both Ferré and Violette Dorange (Devenir) who at 23 is just 40 miles behind Le Cam sailing his old Farr design which he raced to fourth in 2020-21 as Hubert.
