The Ocean Race: "Malizia - Seaexplorer" in third place, "Biotherm" pulls away slightly

Last night, the field of four remaining boats passed the Kerguelen Islands, and indeed, one of the fears of the leading skipper Kevin Escoffier from a few days ago seems to have come true: All four boats are now sailing in the same weather system after all, the advantage his team had at times of almost 700 miles, being one low ahead, has slowly but steadily shrunk to 436 miles. Because the team had anticipated this, "Holcim - PRB" has turned far to the south over the last few days, positioning itself between the first scoring gate west of Tasmania and the opposition. An old basic rule of regatta sailing, Escoffier thus prevents the pursuers from possibly slipping through in the south with better winds.

Meanwhile, "Biotherm" continues to keep its foot on the accelerator on the heels of "Holcim", slowly but very steadily making up miles on the leader. Boris Herrmann and crew now follow in third place, slowly but very steadily losing miles to "Biotherm", the gap has grown to almost 100 miles. After "11th Hour" became surprisingly slow tonight and this morning, first travelling at 14 knots and now only 8.5 knots, Boris and his team were able to take over third place. It is not yet known whether the Americans may have been caught up by the weak wind channel following the western edge of the depression or whether they have a technical problem. The crew had two tears in J2 and 3 and had already repaired one sail, but perhaps they are currently using the weaker wind for the second repair.

Status of the race today at 9:00, go to the live tracker here

Almost all The Ocean Race teams busy with repairs

In any case, the series of technical problems continues. After the team from "Malizia - Seaexplorer" had ticked off the Herculean task of repairing the mast and mending the sails, the team struggled with electrical charging problems yesterday. The generator is acting up, it has to run when the solar panels are barely supplying any power in overcast conditions and the boat is travelling too fast for the wave generators at the stern. The V-belts break at regular intervals. "We still have four spare belts on board, but at the moment we can only manage two loads with one belt!" said Boris Herrmann yesterday. That will hardly be enough, so Boris and Will tried to realign the generator yesterday so that the belt doesn't wear out so quickly.

Meanwhile, on land in Cape Town, the repair work at "Guyot Environnement" is in full swing. The team wants to repair the damaged area in the floor between the companionway hatch and the keel in five to seven days, said crew member Annie Lush in yesterday's video. The sandwich laminate with a Nomex core is to be removed and replaced with one with a foam core, as many Imocas now have. Only Boris Herrmann's boat has solid laminate all over the floor because he was afraid of delamination, which was also a recurring problem on the old "Seaexplorer". Skipper Benjamin Dutreux has now ticked off this leg and hopes that they will be able to sail directly to Itajaí, a journey that will take around 14 days.

The latest news from the race:

• Team Malizia sets the pace on the Southern Ocean motorway

The organiser's video summary from yesterday: