Before Francesca Clapcich and Will Harris set out on the Transat Café L’OR onboard 11th Hour Racing, Harris spoke about the challenge of Trade Wind speed in this classic double-handed transatlantic race.

The point he made was a simple but critical one – that consistently finding modes that are fast downwind is absolutely key to doing well in the race, with the second half of it dominated by this sort of sailing.

“You have got to have your trade wind set-up. You’ve got be really on it with the boatspeed because once you get past the Canaries, the general trend – it’s not always the case – but the last few times, it’s been whoever is the fastest in the Trade Winds,” said Will. “Even if you are back a bit, just hanging onto the pack, if you’ve got better boatspeed, then you’ve got seven days of going slightly faster than everyone else.”

He could not have described the current situation better, as 11th Hour Racing dukes it out with Charal at the head of the 18-strong IMOCA fleet at the beginning of the long Trade Wind highway to Martinique. Behind them, MACIF Santé Prevoyance, Teamwork-Team SNEF and Allagrande MAPEI are all in the hunt for the podium too.

Overnight, during a long hitch out to the west under the Canary Islands, Jérémie Beyou and Morgan Lagravière on Charal drew level and then eased ahead of 11th Hour Racing to retake the lead on day seven.

This morning Charal is about 100 miles due south of the island of El Hierro and around 20 miles to windward of Will and Francesca’s position and – for much of the time – has been travelling faster in a steadily freshening northeasterly breeze. This early manifestation of the northeast Trades is expected to gradually build, taking the leaders towards the Cape Verde Islands before they start heading west and southwest to the Caribbean.

In a memorable phrase, Francesca described Beyou’s black and red foiler as “like a shark coming for the fish!”

“They are really, really fast,” she said. “I don’t think that we can match them – our boats are completely different. But we did a really good job with the rest of the fleet, sailing quite fast.”

She and Will have been handsteering for long periods because they have found that in a northerly swell, that is affecting the waters south of the Canaries right now, the pilot struggles for optimum speed. “It seems we are able to be a bit faster than the pilot and we are just really trying to push to stay in front of the fleet,” Francesca explained earlier in a video from onboard during the night watch.

She also talked about the next routing option. “We are expecting a bit of a right shift with the wind dropping, and we will use that to gybe and kind of do another leg south. During the day [on Saturday] we went along the African coast at that time, to play a shift close to the Sahara desert,” she said.

Once again Francesca was able to report that 11th Hour Racing remains in almost perfect race condition after a week at sea and being pushed hard at the front of the fleet: “Overall everything is pretty good and yeah, we are trying to get into the well-formed Trade Winds and make our way to Martiniuqe. Halfway done – halfway to go!”

At present the routing suggests an ETA for Francesca and Will at Fort-de-France on the afternoon of November 9th.

Ed Gorman

Day 7 - halfway done, half way to go and into the Trade Winds!

Day 8 - despite a penalty, holding firm to third place

Day 6 - first to the Canaries, a significant milestone