Daily Report – November 3rd

With almost eight days under their keel in the Transat Café L’OR, Francesca Clapcich and Will Harris on board 11th Hour Racing are right in the hunt for the podium, trucking along in third position in the Northeast Trades.

Up ahead, Jérémie Beyou and Morgan Lagvravière’s Charal is still setting the pace, with boatspeeds in the early-to-mid 20s, with Sam Goodchild and Loïs Berrehar on MACIF Santé Prévoyance just over 30 miles behind in second place. Then comes 11th Hour Racing, another 17 miles back, but with a useful 50-mile-plus buffer over fourth-placed Allagrande MAPEI sailed by Ambrogio Beccaria and Thomas Ruyant.

Onboard 11th Hour Racing all is well. Despite having to take a 30-minute penalty yesterday afternoon after the seal on their liferaft broke and dealing with a minor issue with a headsail, the message coming over loud and clear from Francesca is that she and Will remain single-mindedly focused on pushing their boat as hard as they can for the remaining days of this absorbing transatlantic sprint.

Francesca summarised the impact of the penalty: “In the end we lost a little bit of distance – especially with Charal and MACIF – and of course the guys behind were able to catch up a little bit more. But we are keeping pushing.”

She said conditions on the water in the Trades are consistently more powerful than predicted by their forecasting tools. “We definitely have more wind compared to the GRIB files, so every time we are ahead of any routing and we need to kind of re-adjust for the wind,” she said.

And yet again the update on the state of the boat is positive. “So far so food,” added Francesca. “Definitely we didn't want the penalty, but it’s part of the game. We took it and we just look ahead at the next few days of this race. Depending a bit on the routing maybe, it’s another five days of racing so we will see how it goes and yeah, keep pushing, pushing, pushing!”

Right now it looks like a bit of a drag race for the next few days in a steady belt of breeze blowing across the Atlantic north of the Cape Verde Islands. This section of the course is all about downwind speed though lateral separation can give boats varying conditions.

Within the top-three this morning, Charal is the most windward boat with MACIF about 30 miles to leeward and with 11th Hour Racing ploughing her furrow in between them. Behind her, Allagrande MAPEI is the most southerly (leeward) boat of the fleet with a lateral separation on Charal of about 50 miles.

Overall, the 18-strong IMOCA fleet is now spread across more than 1,000 miles of ocean with the backmarkers still north of the Canary Islands.

Ed Gorman

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

When sport and science come together during racing …

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