A tricky start

Since setting sail yesterday at 12:27 UTC, the 79 duos competing in the 15th edition of the Transat Jacques Vabre Normandie Le Havre got off to a blistering start, as expected, in a good twenty knots or so of NW’ly wind on choppy seas before the wind dropped away. “Since exiting the zone around the Channel Islands, yesterday evening, we’ve had precious little breeze. It’s a bit hard-going right now as we try to round the north-west tip of Brittany”, confirmed Martin Le Pape this Monday morning whilst positioned in the middle of the peloton, some 37 miles shy of the leaders, offshore of Les Sept Iles archipelago. “The start didn’t go too well for us. We quickly found ourselves in the wind shadow of the boats sailing higher than us. The toughest part was last night, near Guernsey, where we were pinned to the track in a hellish zone of calms. We lost seven miles in one hit there in relation to some of the others. At that point, naturally it wasn’t very nice to see our playmates hotfooting it out of there but we’re remaining calm and focused”, explained Giancarlo Pedote, well-aware that the competition has only just begun and that the strategic choices will gradually be deployed. “The good news for further down the track is that the grib files are a little more in agreement. The options are becoming clearer with regards to hunting down a NE’ly wind behind the ridge of high pressure in the Bay of Biscay in order to make for Cape Finisterre. That will then enable us to hook onto some downwind breeze, which we hope will take us all the way down to the Canaries”, added the co-skipper of Prysmian Group.