Launched and stepped at La Trinité sur Mer in SW Brittany, France last July, Gitana Eighty has thus completed two ocean races consecutively within a month and a half. Following a fairly average performance in the Transat Jacques Vabre following a difficult passage of the doldrums, Loïck Peyron has really controlled this return race between Salvador de Bahia and Port la Forêt: whilst eight of the solo sailors were still neck and neck at the equator, the skipper from La Baule on France’s Atlantic coast, handled the South-North crossing of the doldrums perfectly and was first out of this zone of calms and squalls with a lead of over forty miles. He held onto this lead almost throughout the climb up the North Atlantic, worried for just a few days by the return of Marc Guillemot (Safran) and Yann Eliès (Generali). These two rivals were to experience technical problems however, which proved rather more penalising than those of Loïck Peyron...

Indeed the latter's only issue onboard was the loss of his mast wand, an incident which might appear trifling but did seriously handicap the skipper. The reasons for this were that the wind data was no longer passed on to the navigation centre and, most importantly, it could no longer be coupled with the automatic pilot. As a result the solo sailor had to be on deck as soon as the wind was variable, which was the case on several occasions, initially in the E’ly tradewinds, then during the passage of the Azores and finally during the transition zone off Spain.

Loïck Peyron has taken just fourteen days, nine hours, thirteen minutes, twenty five seconds to complete this Transat Ecover-BtoB, at an average over this 4,120 mile course of 11.94 knots in relation to the orthodromy. Next up, the outcome of the duel between Kito de Pavant (Groupe Bel) and Michel Desjoyeaux (Foncia) is not likely to unfold until right at the finish line, currently forecast for around 0300 UTC Friday morning!

Translation KJ