Pat Lawless Out for Good as Corroded Fittings Fail His Rudder

Pat Lawless's Golden Globe Race is over, and it took a second breakdown to finish it. The Irishman is heading north at 6.1 knots in Silvermines Hydro, and on 21 October he rang race chairman Don McIntyre to say there is no way back in.

The Solent stay that failed on 17 October turns out to be only half the story. McIntyre says the rudder itself is sound, but the fitting that clamps over the rudder head and carries the tiller has given way. That is a bigger loss than it sounds, because Lawless's Aries windvane steers through the tiller. Take away the connection and he loses his self-steering along with his helm.

He made a temporary repair, and for a day race headquarters let itself hope. His manager was hopeful, the organisers were hopeful, and McIntyre had started writing a press release when Lawless called back a day earlier than promised to say it would not hold. A temporary repair is not good enough for four months in the Southern Ocean.

McIntyre's account of the cause is a hard one for a seaman to hear. Two corroded fastenings that looked brand new let go together. When the boat was slipped, Lawless went over the rudder with a small hammer, tapping the metal and listening for the dull clunk that gives a fault away. He did not tap those two. McIntyre, who has carried threaded rod on every boat he has owned so he can cut a bolt to any size, said he wished they had talked about it a year ago.

Lawless has also lost his HF radio, so the satellite phone is now his link ashore. McIntyre says he sounded flat but clear-headed about it. He has no interest in the Chichester Class, as in 2022, and since he called this his last attempt McIntyre suspects the door may now be shut for good. Another boat could not have lent him a bolt anyway. Outside help would have put him in the Chichester Class.

He will carry on north toward the Cape Verde Islands or the Canaries, leave the boat there and fly home. McIntyre puts it at 3,500 to 4,000 miles, or roughly a month at sea. Our earlier report covers the first failure and how the fleet took the news.

Guillou stalls

At the front, Damien Guillou has had a hard few days of another kind. On the night of 19 to 20 October he reported gusts close to 40 knots aboard Solarem. McIntyre had checked the forecast and had 28 to 29 knots sustained, gusting 40. That sits under the 35 knots sustained that triggers a weather alert, so none was issued. Guillou logged 112 miles at 4.9 knots, running on port tack as the wind swung north-east.

Then the wind quit. He sat becalmed overnight into 21 October and was making only 2.5 knots at the 08:00 UTC review. McIntyre expects the breeze to return. A new South Atlantic high is forming to the north, Guillou is below it, and he should have three days of wind pushing him the right way with a following sea.

The 20:00 UTC table on 21 October has him on 20,641 miles to go, with 6,229 sailed and an estimated finish on 30 March.

Two boats, one podium place

Behind him the race for second is the closest contest in the fleet. On 20 October Andrea Lodolo's BiBi was doing 7.2 knots on a 152-mile day and had pulled to within 18 to 20 miles of Ertan Beskardes. McIntyre sees two different approaches. Lodolo is pushing, while Beskardes is looking after the boat and himself, and McIntyre expected Lodolo to pass him.

Wednesday brought a change. Lodolo eased to 3.7 knots and 113 miles. Miss Beagle held 4.7 knots for 135, and McIntyre now thinks Beskardes will edge ahead again as the high builds, with both boats pulling perhaps 300 miles clear of the middle fleet in two or three days.

The table makes the fight look wider than it is. Beskardes is second on 21,127 miles to go and Lodolo third on 21,299, a gap of 172. But Lodolo has sailed about 100 miles further, so the two have taken different routes and the real margin is thinner than it looks. Daniel Pinsky's Exodus, on 21,617, wandered into a squally patch and slowed to 1.8 knots on Tuesday before recovering to 3.4. McIntyre thinks he will just scrape clear of the next calm.

Lawless still shows fourth on the table, on 21,308, because the tracker keeps counting a boat that is no longer racing.

Trouble off Trindade

The middle of the fleet is stacked up around Trindade, and light air is coming for them.

Guido Cantini gave race management the scare of the week on Tuesday. His track in Hannah of Cowes ran at the island and for a while left it unclear whether he would clear the mark. McIntyre dug out the Notice of Race to check the penalty for missing Trindade and found it only says a fine, a time penalty or Chichester Class. He was also watching marine traffic. Cantini turned in time and rounded near sunset with no penalty. The rocks and islets there called for close safety monitoring, McIntyre said, and in the Southern Ocean a missed waypoint costs three days and a fresh mark to round.

Étienne Messikommer's Bernard passed Mara Kveseth's Showgirl on distance to finish on Tuesday after a tighter line round the island. He told his viewers it had taken about eight days to sail from the equator to 20 degrees south, after two weeks of misery before that. By Wednesday he had slowed to 2.1 knots in a hole, with Kveseth getting the breeze first, and the 20:00 table has her back in front. She is on 21,650 to go to his 21,667, with Cantini on 21,712 and Henry Wootton on 21,780.

A cherry "good morning" from Mara Kveseth, Showgirl.

A gap of about 370 miles then opens to Isa Rosli's Olleanna on 22,146, who McIntyre expected to round during the day. Matt Woodside's Tipi Haere (12:00 UTC position) has 22,216, Pär Nyman's Lazy Otter 22,232 and Gunnar Christensen's Pompoen 22,294. McIntyre sees a big hole of light wind for those three within 48 hours, and headwinds past the island will force them to tack.

Louis Kerdelhué is making 5.3 knots toward Recife in IE Charge and sounds in good spirits. The marina beside the Novotel, which looked after the race's Globe 580 crew during the Mini Globe Race, knows he is coming. Local contacts are lining up customs and immigration so nobody has to touch the boat. He has no chart of the harbour, so McIntyre was due to talk him through what he called an easy entrance. Guy deBoer, in the Chichester Class and free to use his engine, was making 5.7 knots in the trades.

Pär Nyman, Lazy Otter, gets ready for his day.

The tracker itself changed overnight. Yellowbrick has added a 3D viewer with wind readouts at each boat and a replay function, and McIntyre showed it off on Wednesday's broadcast. The old viewer is still there, and he prefers it for explaining the weather. Redrawn routes beyond Trindade also mean the distance gaps should be read as a guide, not a ruling.

Life aboard

The broadcasts have turned up some lighter moments. Nyman has lashed fenders around the whole circumference of Lazy Otter, six weeks out, and they now look set for the trip round the world. He has streamed his trailing log out astern as Trindade nears, and on Tuesday he spent a while playing hide and seek with the camera that follows him round the cabin.

Christensen's day involved a finnaker and a mystery. He flew the spinnaker for about eight hours in building waves and hand-steered through most of it, because a Hydrovane cannot anticipate a wave the way a helmsman can. On a replacement log, after he lost the old one, he reckoned Pompoen was making better than six knots. The next dawn he hunted for his insulated coffee mug, which had left its usual spot without going overboard. McIntyre calls dawn on Pompoen his favourite part of the live feed, and got a mention on air.

Messikommer passing Trindade

McIntyre thinks the live broadcasts are changing how the race is sailed. Beskardes pulled out of his first attempt after a week because he could not talk to his family, and now, McIntyre says, he is having an absolute ball with an audience. Guillou treats his daily slot as a technical report. Lodolo has stepped away from the cameras. The HF radio, McIntyre stressed, still matters most for keeping the skippers in touch with each other, and no more than half the fleet will ever have a live broadcast. How the places are shared out in 2030 is undecided, and may be drawn from a hat.

Looking ahead

Guillou should find kinder winds and a following sea, and the next three days will show how much of his lead he can rebuild. Beskardes and Lodolo should both benefit, and the forecast favours the front group over everyone round Trindade, where the next calm threatens to stretch the fleet.

McIntyre is on the move, with a day of travel to Portugal and then Lanzarote ahead of the Globe 580 Transat, so expect shorter tracker updates for a few days.

Our earlier reports include the Lawless retirement and Kveseth's penalty, and our skipper profiles introduce the whole fleet.