News

Today has seen yet another oceanic birthday. This time the celebrations are for Stuart Burbridge enjoying his 34th birthday onboard Ocean Summit. Stuart and Rob will be looking to continue the good progress they have made over the last 24 hours. They are just 20nm behind 6 crews all of whom are within 30nm of each other. No doubt Ocean Summit will be looking to make a summit of there own towards the head of the fleet in the coming days.

As a fleet, the mileage figures at the completion of day 18 are lower than that over the previous record breaking days, but for many crews are still above that required for a new record, including that of Explore hoping to break the all British women’s record over the Atlantic course of 73 days.

It is the solo rowers who seem to be stealing the show at the moment. Charlie Pitcher has now successfully led the fleet for 7 consecutive days and Pete Van Kets, Dave Brooks and Roger Haines continue to leap past the pairs crews. Barring the sporadic position changes of the first few days all three reach fleet highs of 9th, 16th and 21st respectively.

The majority of the fleet have now passed the longitude of 25W marking the western most point of Cape Verde, and will soon adopt a heading of 265-270. With the finish line at 16 58 9N and stretching 1nm South of this, crews will not want to travel to far south and risk crossing that latitude. There will be a careful balance of tactics in deciding how far south to go to make best use of trade winds, against adding to many miles to the race distance.

At the end of day 18 Britannia III found themselves just 124nm from the halfway point of the record attempt. La Mondiale reached the halfway point during their nineteenth day so Britannia III are within a day of the current record. Here’s hoping for a speedy second half.