Approaching the final hours of her second day at sea in the 13th edition of the Route du Rhum, Francesca is holding seventh place in the 22-strong IMOCA fleet on 11th Hour Racing and is on a southwesterly heading about 600 miles north-northeast of Ponta Delgada in the Azores.
After the fast early part of the race, the breeze has now dropped and 11th Hour Racing is making 14-15 knots of boatspeed in a southeast wind still rotating around the bottom of the high pressure centered over Ireland that has dominated the early stages of this race.
Francesca has shown good pace against her nearest rivals over the last 24 hours and this morning was about 90 miles behind the IMOCA leader, Corentin Horeau of France on board MACSF, but only 17 miles behind Boris Herrmann on Malizia 4 in sixth place. Behind her, Sébastien Simon on Groupe Dubreuil-Air Caraïbes was about eight miles adrift.
However, the key element right now is positioning north-south with 11th Hour Racing the most southerly of the leading eight boats and with a lateral separation to Herrmann of around 20 miles and to Simon - the most northerly boat of the leading pack - of 90 miles.
The issue for Francesca is the danger that she is in the widest part of the lightwind patch ahead of a stationary front which runs north-south just to the west of the Azores which is still 150 miles ahead. This was very much on her mind when she spoke to us this morning.
“Life onboard is good and definitely a bit quieter than yesterday,” she said. “The wind is dropping, to be honest, it is a bit of a scary position to be in. I’m further south right now and a few models show a bit of a bigger area without wind, but also, to be super-fair, it has been quite unpredictable, like the shift is not here yet. I have a bit more breeze than the prediction right now. I had less before so it is quite up and down. So I think I am going to just stick with my plan.”
Francesca explained that she has carried out a few gybes to try to reduce her separation with the boats ahead and move a little bit further north as she approaches the front. “The gain is minimal compared to the lateral distance of, you know, Sébastien [Simon] or even the group of the leaders,” she commented.
“I think, to be honest,” she added, looking on the bright side, “I am happy to play with what comes and managing right now is OK. If this area with less wind is slightly smaller being further south, of course it’s a gain, so we will see.”
The stationary front has been sitting there waiting for the Route du Rhum fleet since the start. It will herald a dramatic change in wind conditions as the IMOCAs escape the old high pressure and sail into strong northerlies running down the east side of a new high pressure cell centred to the west of the Azores. Francesca says the weather models differ on whether to head south on the rhumb line or keep heading further west.
“On the other side of the front, we should get a northerly flow, so it’s going to be pretty much 180-degrees after the front and a few models show us staying in that band of wind doing a few gybes and moving south. Others kind of commit straight to the west, so I think it depends how it evolves and we will see in the next few hours,” she explained.
Commenting on the pace since the start off Saint-Malo on Sunday, Francesca said conditions had never been powerful enough for new distance records, but it has still been pretty brutal on boats and skippers.
“The pace has been high, but we never had a really, really strong wind - it’s always been in the 20s. I think we put down some pretty good averages. The sea state sometimes was a bit confused, so maybe that kind of limited the overall really fast pace of these boats. So far we’ve been pushing the boats pretty hard,” she said.
© Julien Champolion | polaRYSE | 11th Hour Racing