Three Vendée Globe skippers so close to each other 37 days after leaving Les Sables d’Olonne, it’s unheard of! At 3 p.m. this Tuesday, December 17, Yoann Richomme from Morbihan was leading the race around the world, followed very closely by Charlie Dalin and Sébastien Simon. The three competitors are in the Pacific, between New Zealand and Point Némo… and were only separated by three nautical miles or approximately six kilometers. Which is to say nothing at all on the scale of a sailing trip around the world.
Four degrees on board
In recent days, Yoann Richomme was more than 500 miles (more than 900 km) behind the leader, Concarnois Charlie Dalin. “I really tried hard not to let myself get discouraged and to pick up the slack. And after the small difference that I managed to face against Thomas Ruyant, allowed me to chain together several weather situations, very advantageously, it must be said. And so, I was teleported a bit to the front of the fleet. It’s pretty awesome“, smiled the sailor, warmly bundled up. “It’s curdling“, he laughs, announcing four degrees in the boat. Yoann Richomme did not hesitate to call his most direct competitor after having overtaken him: “We’ve known each other for a long time, we’ve been racing against each other for a long time, so it’s like that. We know very well that it’s not over“, he recalls. He still has more than 10,000 miles to go.
But in the meantime, the sailor has no damage to report and almost too much time to kill. “Here again, today, I am calm enough to recover. I took a good big nap,” he says. He who admits to being bored easily goes through podcasts – “five a day”, reads the newspaper, even changes his trajectory to enjoy the landscape: I pushed the line a little to pass next to Auckland Island to the south from New Zealand to see land, to see something else”.
“If I had a coin to put today, I would say record broken by two to four days”
Yoann Richomme hopes to arrive at Cape Horn for Christmas and why not then beat Armel Le Cléac’h’s record in 2017? *”*We are almost at his height. It is possible that we pass Cape Horn before him, which would put us ahead of the record. And given the boats we have for the future, it is possible “Yes, it’s possible that we’ll beat the French record.” But be careful not to get carried away, he warns: Afterwards, if we ever have the shitty situation we had on the way down, the North Atlantic was very soft, it took us a lot of time and we have since caught up. . But it is certain that given the potential of the boats we are capable of doing better,” he calculates. The record to beat is 74 days 3 hours and 35 minutes.
