ALex Thomson was the first to cross the Doldrums Passage with his “Hugo Boss” yacht – while the other skippers still had to fight through storms on Wednesday morning. “At the beginning of the night I had a storm, then it brightened up a bit,” says Charlie Dalin, also one of the favorites, who is third. In front of him lies the Frenchman Thomas Ruyant. Only two years ago the skipper Dalin was almost unknown.
In order to control the “black box” doldrums a little better, the sailors try to choose a passage with as few clouds as possible. In the cockpit of his “Apivia” yacht, Dalin pointed to an infrared image in a video on Wednesday. From these he can read cloud masses and storms, he explains. “It helps us to find areas like this, but it doesn’t help us find the right route,” he says. “I’ll see if it goes on like this until I’m out. I’m still 150 miles from the equator. Everything can happen.”
At noon Boris Herrmann also drove through another storm. The sky almost white, the water gray. “It’s a bit scary,” says Herrmann. He too had got caught in a storm that night. “I saw it on the radar, that’s the weather. Let’s see how often it will happen. Those are the doldrums. ”Even if it is stressful, be it normal for the passage.
In the early afternoon the British skipper Samantha Davies (Inatiatives – Coreur) overtook him. She is now in eighth place, making her the best woman. As a baby, only two weeks old, she had been on her own yacht with her parents. Her partner, the Frenchman Romain Attanasio, is also sailing with the Vendée Globe. The nine-year-old son stays with his grandparents while the parents sail around the world. While Davies was picking up speed, the yacht of the Japanese Kojiro Shiraishi was still on flat water on Wednesday. Its main sail was broken. “I’m not happy,” he says. He had to stay in a no-wind zone for three days to repair his sail. “I’m still there. It’s complicated.”
The Vendée Globe is considered to be the toughest regatta for single-handed sailors. It began on November 8th on the French Atlantic coast and leads once around the globe along the Southern Ocean. Boris Herrmann is the first German to take part.
