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Mary Ambler gives her take following this morning's radio vactions in Paris

Just over two days since the multihulls started from Le Havre and the main pack have already passed the latitude of Finisterre, 640 miles down the track - impressive when you calculate that it has taken them 34 hours to cross the Bay of Biscay.

Groupama (Cammas/Proffit) was this morning’s leader, but at 0900 GMT Belgacom (Nélias/L. Peyron) had pushed ahead again, now with a 19.5m lead, but in terms of position, Groupama and Sergio Tacchini (Fauconnier/Foxall) have made the biggest gain to the west while leader Belgacom is the nearest boat to rhumb line and made the most gains to the South at the opposite extreme.

“We’re in 25 knots of breeze from the SSE but the wind is fluctuating from 20-30 knots in seconds,” said Franck Proffit, co-skipper on Groupama. “It’s not easy to manage the boat as the hull lifts up quickly and you have to stay on the helm to react instantly to these changes in wind strength. So we haven’t eaten or slept much…”

60 odd miles to windward of Groupama and in Belgacom’s NW is newcomer to the podium rankings Banque Populaire, in second place now. “We’ve got 30 knots right now and we haven’t slacked off one second since the start,” puffed Pascal Bidegorry, co-skipper with Lalou Roucayrol. “Today will be critical, we can’t miss a beat as we pass through two small low pressure systems ahead of us, so the first one to reach the favourable winds will hit the jackpot! It’s especially important to get well positioned at such an early stage of the race now that without the Ascension Islands marker we have less chance to make any comebacks.”

MULTIHULL OPEN 50

The 50ft multihull Mollymawk skippered by British duo Ross Hobson and Andi Newman made a small technical stop in Brest to fix a problem with their Standard C communication equipment (obligatory to have working for the race). They set off again and are trying to catch the Monohull Open 50 fleet as already the ORMA multihulls have overtaken them.


MONOHULL OPEN 60s

Phase 2 of the Transat Jacques Vabre has begun for the Monohull Open 60 fleet racing directly south in a northwest breeze at around 16 knots average boat speed. This long-awaited wind finally kicked in for the front runners after coming through the last obstacle in the form of a small low pressure cell, which generated unstable winds for several hours before the end of last night. Ecover (Golding/Thompson GBR) is still leading, but the best boat speeds over night came from the boats over to the West as they reached these new winds first. As a result Sill (Jourdain/Thomson FRA-GBR) has risen back up to third and lies now 80 miles from the front, and Cheminées Poujoulat-Armor Lux (Stamm/Lebas SWI-FRA) recorded the top average speed in the fleet of over 16.7 knots.

“We’re on the way back up, but it’s not enough to catch Ecover up, as the leaders have also taken off too. It’s hard to compare downwind boatspeeds with the new boats when we are down alongside them and not in the same weather exactly. We’ll have to find another tactic to pull up to the front,” said Stamm this morning. “For now we’re going at 15 knots average speed in the 20 knot NW breeze, and can smell the South – flying fish appearing, although the temperature is still fresh.”

Alex Thomson on board Sill rationalised the hours to come before the fleet hit the Trades, as he and Jourdain try to come back into contact with the leaders: “In the short term we will hit some light weather first, but Ecover will fall into it as well, and we will then hopefully get the new breeze from the West first as well, to get us on the highway to the Trades and on a better sailing angle than Ecover.”

Mike Golding has an eye on the Anglo-French duo, but is masterfully covering all bases with such a commanding lead: “The boat feels like a missile with the kite up! It is still quite windy. We've been monitoring Sill's progress in the west as time moves on, any benefit she may have will diminish and in fact when we look at their routing, we think they will have a problem later on unless they come down. I think we're in a good spot, we'll just have to wait and see. Think Sill's wind is temporary, right now we're on starboard gybe and think reality is that they are far enough back, that we can do a number of things to counter it if they start to gain on us too severely.”

Golding continued, “We’ve been busy trying to sail the boat in quite a lot of breeze down wind. We’ve got about 20-25 knots of breeze from the northwest and are sailing in quite blustery conditions with left-over gales from yesterday, but its calming down now. It has been interesting testing our masthead kite for the first proper time. It is new to the boat and to us, so you never know how it is going to respond. We’ve been quite conservative and late in testing the spinnaker as the seas are still very rough. We’ve been hand steering for some time now, as the pilot would really be put to the test in these conditions. We’re doing 22 knots of fair flying. Really looking forward to getting some sunshine - almost there now, and the sea’s warm as we level with Madeira.”

Still with a look in on the front of the fleet is Team Cowes in sixth position 161m behind the leader and in PRB’s wake. Co-skipper Sam Davies remains optimistic despite a temporary downslide in terms of miles from the leader: “Unfortunately for us, the boats in the west have so far got away with it, and we didn't gain much there, but we continue to push hard and try and get a few extra miles in every day. It is going to be a hard race. We are hooning now…”

This wind will progressively shift to the north and then northeast for 15-20 knots around the latitude of the Canaries, which are 400m down the track. As the fleet pass to the east of Madeira, the leading two boats Ecover and Virbac (Dick/Abiven FRA) are maintaining similar average speeds as those behind but certainly not outstripping them on this point of sail. Now is the time for the chasing pack to try and make their comeback before reaching Cape Verde some 1,000 miles down the route