Endless Wednesday, December 18 for Justine Mettraux. The Vaudoise is still 11th in the Vendée Globe, and she has regained some calm after going through a depression which lasted three days.
“I was able to eat a real meal, it had been three days since that had happened to me, I changed too, it felt good,” she said on her social networks.
But this Wednesday, December 18, will have seemed like a day without end. Because Mettraux passed the antimeridian, the exact opposite of the Greenwich meridian, in the middle of the Pacific. This is the one that corresponds to the date change.
She passed it at 11:30 p.m. local time (i.e. 2:30 p.m. in Switzerland). Except that once crossed, she had to set her watch back… twenty-two hours. It was indeed 1:30 a.m. “on the other side”.
At the front of the race, Charlie Dalin (Macif Santé Prévoyance) is once again the leader. On Thursday, at the 7:00 a.m. check-in, he had regained a slight lead over Yoann Richomme (Paprec Arkéa) and Sébastien Simon (Groupe Dubreuil).
Almost halfway between New Zealand and Cape Horn, Dalin is sailing 31 nautical miles ahead of Richomme and 47 nautical miles ahead of Simon. The leading trio have generally widened the gap of around a hundred nautical miles on their immediate pursuers.
