Dean Frost and Lee McCarthy lead the Globe 5.80 Transat on Origami, 3.3 nautical miles clear of Viivi Moisio’s Flow at 5pm on Sunday NZ time, with the breeze off Portugal already fading.
It has taken a week to get here. The five home-built 19-footers left Marina de Lagos at 1:01pm on Saturday 14 November NZ time (00:01 UTC), bound for Antigua, after a cancelled qualifier, a collision with a ship, a passing storm and a late withdrawal. They have 3,530 nautical miles of Atlantic ahead of them on the race tracker’s course, and by Sunday evening the leaders had made good about 80.
Why was the qualifier cancelled?
The Globe 5.80 Transat is the small-boat sister race to the McIntyre Golden Globe Race. The boats are 5.8-metre plywood yachts, glassed and epoxied by their owners, and the rules ban weather routing, so the skippers make their own weather calls.
The plan was a qualifying passage from Lagos to Marina Rubicón in Lanzarote, with the Transat proper starting from the Canaries on 14 November. It lasted four days. On 4 November, with two storms lining up across the course and the African coast too close for comfort, race founder Don McIntyre cancelled the qualifier and sent all six boats back to Portugal.
Not everyone got the message at the same time. Katherine Urpani’s Starlink was down on Capucinette, and she only learned of the cancellation about six hours after the rest of the fleet had turned round. The trip home was slow, in light air on the nose, and the boats crept back into Lagos on 6 and 7 November. McIntyre’s verdict was that in ocean sailing the weather always wins.
A collision on the way home
Late on 6 November, about 40 miles south-west of Lagos in the busy shipping lanes off Cape St Vincent, Trekka collided with a large ship. Conditions were benign, around 10 knots and a smooth sea, and Trekka was under her electric autopilot.
Her skipper, Yi Qun Liu, who goes by Yves, was not hurt. The impact snapped the bowsprit. He picked the ship out on AIS and called it several times without a proper reply, then recovered the broken spar, got his sail under control and carried on to Lagos, arriving the next morning.
Trekka has some history. She is McIntyre’s old boat, and Yves had led most of the way south on the qualifier before the recall. On the eve of the start, the race announced that he had made the difficult decision to withdraw from this year’s Transat because of concerns about the weather, and said it hoped to welcome him back in 2028. The race has not given any further detail.
A week in Lagos
The fleet spent the following week in port as Storm Charles brought orange warnings to Portugal, with gusts of 100 to 120 km/h forecast for the mainland.
Bruce Payne had a damaged port solar panel on Meraki after the qualifier’s squalls, and Viivi Moisio repaired several parts on Flow, which had been bumped by a whale on the way south. Dean Frost and Lee McCarthy lined up every radio, power bank and battery aboard Origami for a charge, and reckoned they were recharging their own batteries too.
On Remembrance Day, Bruce and Matthew Freestone paused for a minute’s silence in Lagos. Bruce wrote that four of the entrants are ex-servicemen. He also asked his followers for favourite poems and quotes, planning to keep them in a container and draw one out to read each day at sea.
Why did the race start at midnight?
The organisers made light of it, saying Don’s golden rule is never to start a race on a Friday, so the gun went one minute into Saturday. They also pointed to a good weather window. Viivi’s team said the start was timed to keep the boats out of headwinds and get them across the shipping lanes in daylight.
Five boats and six sailors started:
Capucinette, Katherine Urpani (Malta), hull 28
Flow, Viivi Moisio (Finland), hull 195
Inimini, Matthew Freestone (UK), hull 109
Meraki, Bruce Payne (Australia), hull 178
Origami, Dean Frost and Lee McCarthy (UK), hull 47
Who is leading the Globe 5.80 Transat?
Origami, the only two-handed boat in the fleet, has been ahead at every four-hourly tracker report since the first. At 5pm on Sunday NZ time (04:00 UTC Sunday), the tracker showed:
1. Origami: 81.1 nm made good towards Antigua
2. Flow: 77.8 nm, 3.3 nm behind
3. Inimini: 77.5 nm, 3.6 nm behind
4. Capucinette: 74.1 nm, 7.0 nm behind
5. Meraki: 61.0 nm, 20.1 nm behind
Katherine had Capucinette in front for the first hour or so, before Origami slipped past. On Sunday morning the tracker put Flow and Inimini within about 300 metres of each other on the water.
The first night was wet and lumpy. The boats left in pelting rain and spent the dark hours beating to windward. Viivi called it a rough start: dark, upwind, a heavy rain squall at the off, and an uncomfortable night keeping Flow moving in the right direction. She also said she needed a pinch to believe she was really out there, heading for the Canaries and then Antigua on a boat she built herself.
Bruce had the busiest night. Out near the shipping lane, flying his A5 with two reefs in the main, the sail’s furler came adrift from the bowsprit and a big piece of sail went over the side. He had to lower the lot, keep it out of the water and haul it into the cockpit before stowing it in the forepeak. The furler itself was still out on the end of the bowsprit on Sunday morning, waiting for a sea calm enough to go forward. The race passed on his check-in message, which called it type 2 fun and said all was well.
The episode cost Meraki time, though the tracker cannot say how much of her 20-mile deficit it accounts for. Bruce took up sailing at 53 and this is the first race he has entered, which makes the Atlantic quite an introduction. The Tasmanian is also the closest thing this fleet has to a local, and we will be following him closely.
What is the forecast for the Globe 5.80 Transat?
Light, and then a headwind. The tracker already showed the fleet slowing on Sunday afternoon, with the leaders making good only seven or eight miles in the eight hours to 5pm.
On our reading of the free ECMWF and GFS models on PredictWind, checked at midday on Sunday NZ time, a band of near calm lies along the Portuguese and Moroccan coast through Monday morning NZ time, with 1 to 3 knots where the fleet should be. By Tuesday morning NZ time a south-westerly of 8 to 9 knots fills in, almost on the nose, with 17 to 18 knots further north. Midweek stays light and uncertain, while a much stronger system builds off northern Portugal behind the boats, which gives every skipper a good reason to keep heading south.
With so little wind forecast through Monday, the fleet could spend the next day simply trying to keep moving south. Bruce has said the whole crossing could take him up to 40 days.
