The Vendee Globe Race has finally started to get serious after several days of faffing around in flukey winds off northwest Spain and Portugal in conditions so volatile that last night they'd a messy frontal system going through to provide everything from flat calm to 50-knot gusts in the space of half an hour. But now with the weather pattern becoming clearer with a low pressure area to the south of them moving west-east to pass between Madeira and the Canaries, the challenge is to place yourself northwest of this system in favourable winds.
This means that getting well west was the Number One priority for those who thought more in terms of strategy rather then tactics, and none did this more assiduously than Thomas Ruyant with the new foiler LinkedOut, whose shore manager is Marcus Hutchinson of Kinsale. At times LinkedOut was showing a best overall placing of third in her sometimes very solitary progress southwestward, while others took the short term gain of working local winds relatively close inshore off Cape Finisterre.
None did this more assiduously than Maxime Sorel with the veteran daggerboard boat V & B Mayenne, and he did it so successfully that for a day he was showing repeatedly as the overall leader. There's an enormous irony in this, as one of V & B Mayennne's previous manifestations was as Souffle du Nord, which was of course Ruyant's entry in the 2016-17 Vendee. She was doing very well in that, but was invalided out into New Zealand in a decidedly separational state. However, nothing daunted, she was re-glued with Kiwi ingenuity and finished back in Les Sables-d'Olonne on St Patrick's Day 2018 as Enda O'Coineen's Team Ireland Souffle du Nord, and soon afterwards was sold to Maxime Sorel.
Enda O Coineen's Team Ireland Souffle du Nord in 2018. Re-incarnated as Maxim Sorel's V & B Mayenne, she was showing as overall leader in the current Vendee Globe for more than a day
Thus while the hot favourites were trying either to keep a middle course as per former Crosshaven schoolboy Alex Thomson (his dad was a helicopter pilot out of Cork Airport at the time) with Hugo Boss, while Ruyant stayed doggedly further west, there was the old Souffle du Nord to the eastward staying persistently at the top of the leaderboard even if, like all good things, it was just too good to last.
The long-expected meandering front came in with so much peculiarity in in that at one stage it was shaping up to form a completely new low pressure area, which put everybody's strategy haywire for a while. But as things have been settling down today, there are certain boats of very sharp performance starting to emerge at the top of the leaderboard.
Thus now, four days after the gun was fired, we can finally say the Vendee Globe has really started - we have a race rather than a lottery. And it's Kinsale up against Crosser as they start facing up to the next tactical decision of whether or not to cut through among the eastern islands of the Azores, because staying on the right (or rather top left) side of that low is paramount.
And it's certainly time to get a move on. Yesterday afternoon, three days after the start, they still had to pass the point which Armel le Cleac'h with Banque Populaire had put astern after just two days in 2016 when he set the 74 day record which the stars reckon could be brought below 70 days this time round, and 60 was theoretically possible.
"The Kinsale Boat" – Thomas Ruyant's LinkedOut shortly after the start.
For now, though, it's definitely Game On with Alex Thomson in Hugo Boss first at 18.4 knots, Benjamin Dutreux second but only showing 11.1 knots, Thomas Ruyant still well west of Thomson and showing 16.9 knots in third place with LinkedOut, and Charlie Dalin right beside him with near-sister Apivia in 4th place at 15.1 knots.
Tracker linked here
