Every week at the Global Solo Challenge is a whirlwind of fast sailing, technical problems to overcome, frustration, isolation as well as achievements. A week of challenges for each of the 15 skippers still in the event.
The starting roster had a total of 20 entries of the nearly 60 that had initially registered for the event. A 2 in 3 attrition took place even before the starting gun. The latest to drop out of the entries list of the Global Solo Challenge are American skipper Curt Morlock on the ex-IMOCA “6 Lazy K”, who was due to start on December 9, and the Turkish sailor Volkan Kaan Yemlihaoğlu with his Open 70 “Black Betty”, who was due to start January 6. Both fought teeth and nails to make the start but the financial demands of what would have been the two fastest boats in the fleet were felt hard by the two entrants until both had to come to terms with the impossibility to close the gap in funding needed to prepare their boats safely for this demanding event.
Speaking of older generation ex-IMOCAs such as Curt’s “6 Lazy K”, we love the idea of these older boats having a second life as they no longer take part in the race they were built for. The last time a fixed keel Open 60 took part in a Vendée Globe it was the year 2012 when Italian Alessandro di Benedetto campaigned his “adventure” entry on Team Plastique to take last of the only 11 finishing boats. Despite the high budget and high professional level of the majority of entries it is not until more recent editions of the Vendèe Globe, with standardised keels and masts, that the attrition rate was dramatically reduced. In fact after just 2 weeks of sailing in the 2012 edition, 7 of the 20 starters strong fleet had already dropped out for reasons ranging from dismasting, collisions, autopilot failure and canting keel problems with more forced to retire later.
We are therefore very pleased to see that of the 16 boats that started in the Global Solo Challenge, only one has formally retired. Two have stopped for repairs in Cape Town but managed to restart: Edouard de Keyser on Solarwind and Ari Känsäkoski on ZEROchallenge. One is currently stopped in Hobart assessing the situation, Dafydd Hughes on Bendigedig, who has already achieved the extraordinary feat of sailing halfway around the world in about 100 days on his S&S 34, the smallest and slowest boat in the fleet. This leaves the Global Solo Challenge with 14 sailors at sea: 11 in the Indian Ocean, 2 in the Southern Atlantic and only 1, Kevin Le Poidevin, still in the northern hemisphere. Kevin started a month late and has been far from lucky with the weather encountered so far resulting in slower than expected progress towards the south. We appreciate that the format of the GSC allows for technical stops (unlike the VG), but, considering this event is not reserved to top elite sailors and their huge budgets, we think this does not diminish the achievements or efforts put in by the skippers, especially as they all sail slower and smaller boats than the elite pros.
Philippe Delamare on Mowgli, after Dafydd Hughes stopped on Bendigedig in Hobart, has taken the overall lead on water and in estimated finish time rankings with a faultless navigation to date. Philippe has not reported any significant problems and has kept an amazingly regular pace, slowing down and sailing prudently in the worst part of each depression but never losing focus on finding an efficient route forward. His strength is in the amazing regularity of his progress worthy of an ultra-marathon runner who can find the pace and balance between speed and long term resistance. Unfortunately Philippe did lose use of his Starlink antenna after a knockdown in the South Atlantic that caused the antenna to be submerged under water and stop working, so we don’t receive as much information as from other more vocal skippers. Philippe was anyway quite reserved to start with, or rather, he is out there enjoying his own circumnavigation and loves what he’s doing, which truly comes through in his incredible seamanship. Many of his competitors in the event have confided their admiration for the regular and relentless pace of the French captain, especially after starting sailing in the roaring forties and encountering their first serious problems with equipment failure in the face of the harsh sailing conditions, which only make Philippe’s performance so far even more remarkable.
This past week has been one of many challenges for the outstanding Cole Brauer whose performance in the Global Solo Challenge has been remarkable on the water as well as from a mediatic point of view, grabbing the attention of more than 100 thousand followers on her Instagram channel. After last week’s broach and knock down caused by a breaking wave, Cole has had to deal with the constant reminder of that episode with pain at her ribs, causing her difficulty in moving around freely or even simply jumping out of her “bed” when action is required. Adding to the misery, the young American skipper has had to deal with a faulty rudder reference unit, the same piece of equipment that caused Dafydd Hughes to pull into Hobart. Luckily she has a spare sensor but there now is an inherent concern of what to do should this sensor fail too. Hopefully it will remain as just a concern. A wave of support has reached the talented revelation of this event whose determination and performance has been nothing short of inspiring.
First Light, Cole Brauer’s Class 40, has once again been the fastest boat in the entire fleet over the past 7 days sailing more miles than Andrea Mura’s canting keel Open 50. In fairness it should be said that Andrea is sailing a very remarkable course too and at excellent speed to, but is currently close reaching in southeasterly trades in the Atlantic, which is certainly not as fast a point of sail as going downwind. Still, Cole holds the overall record for the fastest week of sailing to date in the event with 1777 nautical miles at an average of 10.5 knots, which is more than 20% more miles than those sailed by Philippe Delamare on Mowgli this past week. The French sailor covered 1438 miles at an average of 8.5 knots. It wasn’t long ago that someone commented to me that he had run some calculations and thought there was no way for Cole could possibly close the gap on Philippe Delamare as that would have required her sailing 2 whole knots faster than him. Well, it’s happening!
The format of the GSC is a novelty for such a long distance event and therefore the public may find it more difficult to fully grasp who’s sailing well, who’s gaining and who’s dropping behind. On the homepage of the website the estimated time of arrival is updated every 4 hours and the estimated time gap to the leader is provided in sailing days. The baseline assumption is that, purely theoretically speaking, all boats would finish together on the same date on the 15th of March 2024. The estimated finish time calculated on the ranking is a simple extrapolation of the distance to finish if it were sailed at the same average speed held by each boat to that point. What the calculation does not do, and it would be very difficult to model, is take into account that certain sections of the event are faster than others, with the south often providing the fastest sailing days in the entire event.
The reason modeling the expected speed in various sections of the circumnavigation may be counter productive is that, regardless of seasonal averages, the wheel of fortune spins for every skipper and they may find unusually fast or slow conditions in each section. The idea is that the element of “luck” will distribute evenly over the whole circumnavigation as you can’t simply call lucky someone performing well day after day for 25,000 miles, whereas one may be lucky over a short weekend race. Therefore, given the theoretical goal of finishing on the 15th of March (or earlier indeed), skippers must try to accumulate as much advantage on fast days and bleed as little mileage as possible in slow patches.
You can think of it as a game of golf where each skipper must match his own handicap in relation to the par of the course. You can also think that the southern seas section of the golf course is where skippers are more likely to score birdies (-1) and eagles (-2). Or why not an albatross, a name which is perfect for this event, which in golf refers to finishing a hole at 3 under par. All the miles “under par” that a sailor accumulates can be used to fend off the boogie days, in slow areas of sailing such as the doldrums or horse latitudes.
Regardless of the analogy or metaphor you want to use, the simple fact is that currently Philippe Delamare, Cole Brauer, Ronnie Simpson and Andrea Mura are the only 4 skippers that have sailed under their golfing par on the course, or, in sailing terms, faster than they were expected to.
In the chase within the event Cole has shaved 339 Nautical Miles off Philippe’s lead in the past week, nearly 50 miles a day, with Philippe having done very well in defending his lead so far, and still holding a huge 3950 Nautical miles Advantage. At the current averages Philippe would finish his Global Solo Challenge in approximately 70 days, or 10 weeks, meaning that Cole would not manage to close the entire gap and would still be 550 miles from the finish when Philippe crosses the finish line. However, this is little more than a mathematical exercise and is inherently flawed in that it is a mere extrapolation. We must in fact note that Philipped has “only” 4750 Miles left in the fast south, whilst Cole has a whole 8500 Nautical Miles to Cape Horn making the gap between the two boats far from insurmountable as Philippe will inevitably slow down and sail fewer daily miles after Cape Horn.
Whilst sailing a similar mileage to Cole Brauer in the past week, another American sailor has risen day after day sailing with growing presence and increasing his baseline daily runs. Ronnie Simpson on Shipyard Brewing has consolidated his third place in estimated finish rankings and also closed the gap to Philippe Delamare, meaning that he too could in time become a headache for the French leader whilst keeping young Cole on her toes.
The fourth skipper in estimated finish time is Andrea Mura, and although his gap to the lead seems huge, at 7700 miles from Philippe Delamare and 3750 from Cole, we must take into account that the Italian skipper has not yet even entered the favourable winds of the south seas having left 3 weeks after the young American skipper and 7 weeks after the French leader. He too will very likely start increasing his daily runs once further south meaning that, he too, could become a player in this round the world pursuit.
This analysis concentrated on the best performing boats in absolute or relative terms, but the past week has been one of many remarkable achievements by all sailors in the Global Solo Challenge. We congratulate Edouard de Keyser on Solarwind and Ari Känsäkoski for managing to carry out all their needed repairs inCape Town and restart their circumnavigation. We wish to thank all those people ashore that came forward voluntarily to help the skippers that stopped in their work showing the enormous solidarity that exists among seafarers.
We are also watching the steady and remarkable progress of Italian Riccardo Tosetto whose level headed paced approach to the event seems to be yielding the results he was hoping for. He was one of the fastest this week, having sailed 200 miles more than the previous week, increasing his personal best, consolidating his position in the fleet, and steadily closing the gap to Pavlin Nadvorni on Espresso Martini although it must be said that the latter has been occupied by the need to laminate and reinforce the deck around the rudder shaft bearing which was moving. The south has yielded fast days for David Linger on Koloa Maoli and Francois Gouin on Kawan3 who have both sailed more than 200 miles a day. William MacBrien held similar speeds but had to deal with a broken staysail furler attachment that forced him to head further north than wanted to replace the broken part.
Louis Robein on Le Souffle de La Mer III seems to have embraced the south without apprehension, after changing down his headsail for a smaller and heavier sail for the south, he has dipped to the roaring forties, whilst he had been sailing very cautiously before Cape of Good Hope with his lighter winds headsail.
David Linger on Koloa Maoli and Ari Känsäkoski on ZEROchallenge were the latest two of the skippers to have entered the Indian Ocean leaving just Alessandro Tosetti in South Atlantic (who was forced to a 6 days stop in Portugal in the early stages of the event and is hence further back) and Andrea Mura on Vento di Sardegna who, at the time of writing had already nearly caught up with the compatriot on Aspra. Kevin Le Poidevin on Roaring Forty, the only boat in the northern hemisphere, has finally found steady trade winds and is progressing south having sailed in a week from the Canaries, where he was forcefully parked in a seasonally abnormal windless ridge of high pressure, to past the Cape Verde archipelago.
It’s been another great week of sailing, and the public seems to really enjoy the blogs and videos coming from the boats as the skippers share their experience with those ashore, with a boom in traffic and following which has grown nearly exponentially since the boats have entered the roaring forties and have enchanted us with stories and images from the southern seas.
To read about the adventures of each skipper, read the Skippers’ blog page: https://globalsolochallenge.com/blogs/
Moreover, if you wish to support a skipper and send them a personal message, you can do so from each skipper’s profile page on the Entries Profiles page: https://globalsolochallenge.com/entries/
To stay updated on the competitors’ positions, the tracker is available on the GSC website: https://globalsolochallenge.com/tracking/ or by downloading the “YB Races” app and adding the Global Solo Challenge to your races and be able to follow the positions of all boats from your mobile.
