The leading trio Charlie Dalin (MACIF Santé Prévoyance), Yoann Richomme (PAPREC ARKÉA) and Sébastien Simon (Groupe Dubreuil) is now gybing along the ice exclusion zone, just 300 miles south of Point Nemo, the furthest point on earth from land. They remain close together sailing at average speeds around 20 knots, although Simon has slipped to almost 100 miles behind Dalin as a result of his broken foil.
Almost 1,100 miles to the west of the leaders, Boris Herrmann (Malizia - Sea Explorer) in eighth place has been carrying out rigging work on his foredeck, with the boat flying at 22 knots. He says he feels good today with “lots of work” following “a bit of rest last night after the storm, where you never sleep that well, gettingthrown around in the bunk.
“Today I had to change an important part of the rigging, the furler of the code zero. That took me a little bit of effort and time, but it was fun having a mission and I went working on the foredeck sometimes at quite high speeds, which the sea state just barely allowed. Sometimes I had to hide behind the sail to avoid too much wash.”
Foredeck work at 22 knots!
Boris hasn’t yet managed to extract the footage from the GoPro camera, so for now we have to rely on his description. He says his boat’s high bow, combined with the shape of the hull’s fore and aft rocker means, “you can actually work on the bow going at 22 knots of boat speed or even more, without getting sucked under water, or without getting thrown back from nose diving. It just doesn't happen.
“That was really cool to fly there high over the water while I was tinkering around with the ropes and then finally got the sail up. I was sailing a bit slower in that time, so it made me lose probably a few miles, but nothing dramatic.
“The general pattern is unchanged. Yannick is a bit ahead and sometimes gaining because it's a bit ‘rich, get richer’. Sometimes he has a bit better breeze – I guess we see what the night brings and talk to you tomorrow.”
“A horrible stretch”
Samantha Davies (Initiatives-Coeur) spent weeks in close company with Boris, Justine Mettreux (Teamwork – Team SNEF) but has slipped back to 13th place. Today she is one of four boats, with Clarisse Crémer (L’Occitane en Provence), Benjamin Dutreux (Guyot Environnement – Water Family) and Romain Attanasio (Fortinet – Best Western), beating upwind to the south of New Zealand.
“Just now, we are in a horrible stretch – headwinds with four metre seas,” she says. “That normally never happens in the Southern Ocean, but we have to pass a depression on the wrong side. Not only have we lost lots of miles because we missed the depression two days ago, but we also have a double punishment.
“The boat is jumping waves like a kangaroo, it's hell! It's not for very long at least, there must be six hours of the worst and we should find the wind in the right direction. That's the challenge of the Vendée Globe – it's never easy, but I’m not alone. Clarisse and I exchanged messages to tell each other that it was hell!
“After six weeks at sea, time goes by so quickly. It's incredible because I really feel like the start was a few days ago, and at the same time so many things have happened! Honestly, it's great and I am not finding it feels long, but there will probably be some difficult moments.
“I feel good, even if there is the frustration of seeing competitors pull ahead. I was happy with my small group with Justine and Boris, but at the same time I had some technical problems that slowed me down. I try to tell myself that at least I am still here, the boat is in good condition, except for a few blackouts sometimes.
“There’s no obvious route to Cape Horn, so you have to accept that, but anything can happen on the Atlantic, the important thing is to stay on top of things if the opportunities arise.
“I am doing a little work on my positive attitude, but I am not bored, I love the boat and the challenge of this Vendée Globe, there have been some great days, even if there are also rotten ones like today. But I am fully into this Vendée Globe. I try to have routines, to follow the sun a little because here we are out of sync all the time, we are catching up with the sun, so the body is adapting all the time, it is a little lost in relation to the hours of sleep and all that, but I try to eat at sunrise, to take big naps in the very short nights.”
Even more crazy than us?
Few other yachts venture as far south as the Vendée Globe skippers, and neither does commercial traffic, with the exception of very sporadic fishing boats. So it was a surprise for Antoine Cornic (Human Immobilier) to encounter another yacht roughly 900 miles south east of Cape Leeuwin.
“I can share with you something pretty incredible – I came across a boat at sea 11 metres long – a Norwegian sailing alone who is doing a world tour just for fun,” Antoine reports. “I think we found someone crazier than us! We chatted for five minutes on the VHF – he hadn't seen another boat for 110 days which made the guy happy to talk.”
All about Point Nemo
Point Nemo is one of the key passages of the Vendée Globe and for good reason: it is the place on the globe furthest from any land. Even the International Space Station is closer! The leading trio, Charlie Dalin (MACIF Santé Prévoyance), Yoann Richomme (PAPREC ARKÉA) and Sébastien Simon (Groupe Dubreuim) should pass it on Friday morning. Explanations.
"48°52.6 South, 123°23.6 West" are the coordinates of Point Nemo. It is really only a theoretical point on the charts but symbolically it so important. Scientists have dubbed it "the maritime pole of inaccessibility". The nearest land is 2,688 kilometres away. These are Ducie Island, an uninhabited atoll that is part of the Pitcairn Islands, Motu Nui Island near Easter Island, and Maher Island in Antarctica.
This point has only been known and named since 1992 when a Canadian engineer of Croatian origin, Hroje Lukatela, managed to determine it thanks to clever mathematical calculations. He took the name "Nemo", inspired by Jules Verne's famous Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a sailor who did not like to be around humans.
A "biological desert"
The humans closest to the sailors at Point Nemo are actually the inhabitants of the International Space Station, 400 km above the surface of the globe! The place is also popular with space agencies including NASA. This is where they land their satellite or space debris. Being far from any inhabited land, it is indeed the ideal place to minimize the risk of collisions or damage.
It is a "biological desert.” Marine life is very limited. As all land is thousands of kilometres away, there is no real nutrients such as are normally transported by rivers or soil runoff and which participate in the marine food chain. And so life forms are very rare, except for microorganisms and a few species of fish.
The Paul Meilhat precedent
It is also a special moment for the sailors of the Vendée Globe. Because the other consequence of the remoteness of the land is the difficulty of rescue by emergency services. It would take more than 15 days for a boat to get there. Paul Meilhat reflects that during his first Vendée Globe, in 2016, it was near Point Nemo that he discovered that his keel ram was cracked, forcing him to retire.
At that point, I was in third place, he said earlier. It was obviously difficult to take shelter. We had found a solution, I had diverted to French Polynesia. It took me about 8 days to get there!