Sailing, Sailing…: Ellen MacArthur has clawed her way back to a 2.5 hour lead over Francis Joyon. Click on this cool animation to see how she did it (B&Q is the boat that is furthest west, IDEC tucks along the coast, and the white boat is a theoretical pace marker sailing the most direct route). Overnight, the big 40-knot winds forecast kicked in and Ellen reported a wild ride: “I’ve been surfing at speeds between 16 and 32 knots! We’ve got 35 to 45 knots, and the seastate is just ****** huge…its humungous…the depression has been here for a while, so it (sea) has just built and built…occasionally we hit a wave very hard…” See the latest daily report here. Ellen’s next tactical challenge is to get past the Canary Islands, with their dangerous wind shadows. Joyon stayed well east (upwind). Ellen is trying to get west…

Meanwhile, Down South in the Vendee, King Jean Le Cam has sailed out to the front again, as Vincent Riou on PRB has taken a tactical gybe north to position himself for the next depression. Latest daily report here. Latest positions here. Riou and Le Cam are now in the Indian Ocean, which is generally considered to be the nastiest, most unforgiving leg of the course. Here’s a little racing history of the place, courtesy of the Vendee website:

“It is here, in this merciless ocean that renowned French sailor Isabelle Autissier dismasted during the Boc Challenge 94, prior to seeing the roof of her monohull wrenched open by a breaking waves like a vulgar tin opener. This is also the area where there were long hours of anguish after the consecutive capsizes of Raphaël Dinelli, Thierry Dubois and Tony Bullimore. It’s there too, more recently, that Ellen MacArthur’s maxi-catamaran Kingfisher II dismasted during the Jules Verne Trophy attempt in January 2003. By entering into this ocean, the skippers in this Vendée Globe often have just one desire: to get free of the zone without damage to find what is known as a more established Pacific swell.”

Gulp. But if you want to see why the sailors sacrifice everything to get there, go to the video page and check out the clip of SILL rocketing along that Roland Jourdain just sent in. Looks incredible. Here’s Jourdain’s description of what it’s like:

“Winter sports have started … balancing act between wanting to go fast,

and the hope to go in a straight line … big sea, last night was nice

until the (cold) front, but since the wind went up to 50 knots…had a big

wipeout…the wind then dropped a bit, but it was night time, I stayed

careful … this morning wind back up again. Fully crewed it would be fine,

alone it’s hard. Wipeout was pretty bad, I was asleep, you feel it going

… it’s too late … wiped out more than 90 degrees.”

The videos are only going to get more impressive, and more hair-raising. Hope Sill’s camera survived that last wave…



Sill At Speed: “Holy Merde! I can never get enough of this…”