Oakley Marsh and his DigiLab crew had plenty to prove when the Tour de France à la Voile's first offshore leg got underway, but the challenge that would define their race had nothing to do with tactics or boatspeed. It came wrapped around a fishing line.
Nine Figaro Beneteau 3 crews departed Cherbourg on Sunday afternoon, routing via Needles Fairway off the Isle of Wight as winds climbed to around 30 knots. Two Channel crossings, powerful tidal streams, and a sustained push toward the Breton coast combined to make the Cherbourg-to-Saint-Malo passage as demanding as anything the race would serve up. Race director Yann Chateau noted that these were precisely the conditions the course was built to expose: fast, unforgiving, the sort of racing where a small positioning error compounds into a meaningful loss of ground within minutes.
Marsh, co-skippering with Joss Creswell under the DigiLab banner, was in contention when things went sideways. Somewhere out in the Channel, the crew came close to a fish tangled in a line, then made things considerably worse trying to help it. As Marsh described it in an early morning update, the attempt to free the line from the fish's mouth ended with the rope wrapped around the keel instead. From that point on, DigiLab was dragging fouled gear through the water, carrying a speed deficit at precisely the moment the race demanded otherwise.
Through the remaining hours of darkness, the crew worked through their options, all without putting anyone into the confused and turbulent Channel seas. The decision was to wait for better conditions before attempting anything.
By the following morning, as the fleet tracked into flatter water off the Breton coast, they made their move. A crew member went over the side, dived on the keel, and cleared the line. "We made an attempt and was successful," Marsh reported. "So back up to full speed and chasing down the pack. Still some race to go. Vibes are good on board."
The leg was far from over when the dive was completed. The fleet was spread across roughly ten miles and the final approach to Saint-Malo still lay ahead. Race control had already adjusted the closing stages, redirecting the fleet toward South Minquiers rather than the originally planned waypoint, but the racing remained tight. At the Saint-Servantine mark, PAPREC by Normandy Inshore Program held the lead, with Dunkerque-Kiloutou in second and Region Bretagne-CMB Espoir in third.
What that opening leg handed Marsh and the DigiLab crew was a reminder of what offshore racing can produce without warning: not a blown piece of gear or a costly navigation call, but the pure, random friction of the sea. They sized up the situation calmly, held off until conditions allowed, then got the job done. Thirty starts remain across the next two weeks, and Saint-Malo was only the first of them.
