Three way battle continues

Leaders continue to swap positions on day 12 of the Transat AG2R La Mondiale

Little to report on the Transat AG2R La Mondiale race course this Friday morning. While Armel Le Cleac'h and Fabien Delahaye continue to lead on BritAir, it remains extremely close between the front four boats. For example BritAir may be ahead by 10.6 miles at the latest sched but at the last sched yesterday Romain Attanasio and Sam Davies had pulled in front and regaining first place on Saveol only for BritAir to be back by the first sched this morning. This has mainly been due to Saveol and BritAir swapping sides of the course.

The interesting span of north-south options is playing out. The leaders remain in the middle of the bulk of the 25 strong fleet still with AGIR Recouvrement some 115 miles north of the leader's track, with Nicolas Troussel and Thomas Rouxel on Credit Mutuel de Bretagne some 135 miles to the south of the leaders. On a flyer with nothing to lose are Kito de Pavant and Sebastien Audiagne on Groupe Bel, who are trying to come back from last place following their stopover in the Canaries to replace a rudder after it was broken in a collision with a whale.

Generally the last 24 hours has seen an extension in the fleet with the top 13 being within 96 miles of the leader yesterday morning while this morning the same distance separates the eighth placed boat from the leader. Over this period Yann Elies and Jérémie Beyou on Generali Europ Assistance have done well to the north overtaking Joseph Brault and Sopra Groupe skipper Antoine Koch on Gaspe 7, to claim sixth place.

The boats are now a long sound of the great circle to St Barths and this is likely to remain the case over the weekend as due to the positioning of the high pressure to the north of them tomorrow the wind will go light ahead of them on the right side of the course. Come Sunday there will be two giant areas of high pressure dominating the southern part of the North Atlantic, one centred between Portugal and the Azores, the other centred just south of Bermuda with the AG2R fleet having to negotiate area south of the the meteologicial no mans land between the two highs. This scenario is fairly static and continues into Monday with the weather forecast indicating that conditions are set to go light pretty much all the way across the race course before the high south of Bermuda becomes the dominant feature by Tuesday. Essentially being south is likely to reap dividends over the next few days even if it does cost sailing extra miles. 

See the top image full size here courtesy of Expedition Navigation Systems and PredictWind.

Positions at 1048