The trade winds have found the Golden Globe fleet, just as we expected after Guillou's Trindade pause. After weeks of calms that split the fleet and slow Atlantic work, almost every boat still racing is now reaching in the south-east trades, and on Day 34 the tracker finally looks like a race again.
At the front, the gap has shrunk. Damien Guillou on Solarem has 21,665 nautical miles to sail, with Pat Lawless on Silvermines Hydro 142 miles back on distance to finish. The honest figure is smaller. Measured by distance actually sailed, Lawless is 106 miles behind, down from 142 the day before, which means he clawed back around 36 miles in 28 hours. The tracker's route beyond Trindade has been redrawn, so raw distance to finish has been jumping about, and the sailed figures tell the straighter story.
Golden Globe Race 2026: distance sailed
Tracker snapshots, start to Day 34
Source: Golden Globe Race live tracker (Yellow Brick)
Lawless is chasing at around 5.3 knots. Guillou is doing 5.9, but he is running into a small high and then headwinds. Race chief Don McIntyre says a cell building ahead of the leader could park him and push both men south before the highs merge, which might hand the chaser up to 200 miles in two days. Guillou has roughly 48 hours to build a cushion before that door closes.
Third place belongs to Ertan Beskardes on Miss Beagle, who logged 154 miles in 24 hours and sits 252 miles clear of Andrea Lodolo on BiBi in fourth. Behind them the middle of the fleet has bunched. Pinsky, Kveseth, Messikommer, Cantini and Rosli are all making between 3.7 and 4.0 knots and are separated by about 226 miles of course. Wootton, Nyman, Woodside and Christensen make up the next group, while Louis Kerdelhué is still crawling at around 2.3 knots, sending safety messages but not yet holding a proper conversation ashore. Overall, the fleet is stretched across 2,809 miles. Three of the fifteen sailors are ahead of Jean-Luc Van Den Heede's 2018 pace, and five are ahead of Kevin Neuschäfer's 2022 benchmark.
Not everyone is enjoying the breeze. Wootton reported 25 knots from the south-west gusting to 35, a three-metre sea and some minor rigging damage. Guy deBoer, the last Chichester Class entry afloat, is pushing through about 28 knots at 6.2 knots of boat speed and put 147 miles in the log. Mara Kveseth's tracker has gone stale near the equator. Yellow Brick is looking into it and a backup unit is ready, and McIntyre reckons she has just crossed the line.
Life on the trades
With the weather settling, the skippers have been talking on the live broadcasts, and the picture is a good deal warmer than the table suggests.
Beskardes started the weekend by spilling his milk. Mopping out a flooded stowage, he turned up three bottles of Heineken, a bottle of wine and a bottle of champagne from a Les Sables friend, Guy Rogers, which is earmarked for Cape Horn. One of the beers is saved for Trindade, which he hopes to reach on Thursday in daylight so he can film it. On Saturday he found that a previous owner had drilled through a watertight cockpit locker, letting water into the bilge. He plugged it with the wooden bungs he carries for seacocks, and plans to seal the gas locker and sink drains before the Southern Ocean. Evenings are spent on deck with a Coke and the shortwave, Chinese broadcasts one night, the BBC World Service the next. He has already saved a little fizz for Neptune at the equator, and Miss Beagle is the former Matmut. Ashore he runs a family medal-mounting business in Bournemouth, framing service and emergency awards. He says he would like to see a Frenchman win, and has no complaints about Guillou.
On Pompoen, Gunnar Christensen is nearing the equator for the first time in his life. His barnacle-scraping swim, which ended with his inflatable drifting off toward the horizon, is behind him. He navigates by sextant, one of a pair picked up on eBay for £85, and has two bottles of Calvados set aside for the finish. The Hans Christian 34's name is Dutch for pumpkin, a gift from an earlier owner, and Christensen is about to cross the track of one of her old voyages. He is a Lymington RNLI crew member.
Étienne Messikommer on Bernard sat at about 1°N on Saturday, hoping for the equator, and sent hellos to the markets of Brest and Saint-Renan. In the night he had dreamed of cutting wood with his brother and father. Pär Nyman on Lazy Otter thanked Åsa for the monthly bags of sweets and nuts that reach him, and the Les Sables helpers who got his boat race-ready. He hopes to reach Cape Horn at the very least, and sails barefoot.
Guillou at Trindade
The best story came from the leader, who had told race management before he stopped. Guillou tried to slip into the sheltered bay at Trindade and found surge, rock and no useful bottom. He anchored in a corner anyway, snagged the anchor on the rocks and had to work it free, damaged. After dark he watched fires burning on an island he had thought deserted, which sits well with McIntyre's note that it hosts a Brazilian military presence.
Our earlier report covered the stop itself; this is the view from the cockpit. In the light airs that followed, he dived to clean the hull and found two small fish sheltering in the shadow of Solarem. He has patched the genoa with repair tape, enjoyed his third shower of the race and kept faith with a rule learned four years ago, two desserts at every meal. He has had no radio contact with the fleet and no word on Lawless.
Ashore
The Les Sables gathering is on Thursday 16 October at 6pm, with McIntyre phoning Guillou at 6.30. A signed poster is currently at 550 euros, closing Sunday night with the winner named on Monday, and a second poster signed by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston will be auctioned after Cape Horn. The money goes to a charity supporting people with neurological conditions.
New to the race? Our skipper profiles introduce the whole fleet. Next up is whether Guillou can hold off the high, how much Lawless can claw back, and whether Beskardes reaches Trindade in daylight with his beer.
