It was a costly night. Even those who had managed to keep up with the rest of the field had to succumb to the speed of front runner Charlie Dalin and his Verdier design "Macif".
The favourite for victory will be able to use the South Atlantic low for the longest and foreseeably best time to fly on starboard bow with possibly only two gybes to the geographical longitude of Cape Town. Thomas Ruyant may also be able to do this, although he also slowed down this morning.
Yoann Richomme expresses concerns
For Yoann Richomme, on the other hand, who unintentionally veered onto a more southerly course yesterday when switching from the large to the small gennaker, things are already getting more difficult. He was more than 80 nautical miles behind this morning and was already expressing doubts as to whether he wanted to put himself and his boat through the increasingly bumpy ride for too much longer.
"It's really tough," he said. The sea is not even very demanding. "But the boat is crashing in all directions - not very confidence-inspiring."
I don't think we can last two months like this!" Yoann Richomme, "Paprec-Arkéa"
Behind Paul Meilhat on "Biotherm", who is holding on to eighth place, the invisible rubber band on which the Imoca skippers are catapulted to the south-east is increasingly stretching. The 2020/21 Vendée winner, Yannick Bestaven, has lost 60 nautical miles to Charlie Dalin since yesterday alone; sailing in ninth place, he is already 220 nautical miles behind. Sam Davies in tenth place is just under 350 nautical miles behind the leader.
Vendée Globe: Boris Herrmann keeps up with the race until Cape Town
Only Boris Herrmann came close to the pace of the leaders with a time of 483 nautical miles. He improved by two places to eleventh. His gap of almost 400 nautical miles will continue to grow - although probably not as much as he himself feared. Up to Cape Town, he had expected to be up to 1,200 miles behind Charlie Dalin. It is more likely that it will be more than half that.
At least that's what the routings that meteorologist Jure Jerman calculated for YACHT last night show. His cloud-based navigation tool Dorado Sail, which is also used by the top skippers of the Vendée Globe and the race organisers, puts the Hamburg native 665 nautical miles behind the leader in the night from Sunday to Monday. So it remains exciting, especially as the rough conditions in the Indian Ocean are likely to suit the "Malizia - Seaexplorer" more than the "Macif", which is more suited to shallow water.
At this point, a note on the updated Windy plug-in for the Vendée Globe. If you reinstall it in your browser (We'll show you how to do it here!), now also receives a kind of routing for the next few days in the form of a course line extended forwards. However, this is subject to major inaccuracies because it is not created on the basis of an ensemble routing and without even remotely reliable VPP data.
