Another one for the winter armchair sailors. Joyon's 57 day solo circumnavigation was amazing to watch and now we have another one shaping up. After 8 days Groupama is 677 miles ahead of Orange's record pace.
http://cammas-groupama.geovoile.com/julesverne/index.asp?lg=en

What a fantastic job on that site! Good luck to the Groupama3 boys too, they appear to be doing an excellent job so far.

A fun game aswell, you can steer your own boat around the world. You can sign up to play along until 14 days after the start, so lees than 6 days left.
http://julesverne-groupama.virtualregatta.com

Franck Cammas and his crew are incredible, nevertheless I find it hard to feel same enthousiasm as I had for Mr Joyons' record race, too much in too little time I guess. But let's not complain, there can just be no such thing as too much spectacular sailing.

677 miles is barely over a day in these monsters - I wouldn't say they've accomplished much yet!

Look at it from this perspective :

After 8 days of sailing Groupama is a whole day ahead of Orange 2 !

That is about the same in percentages as leading your 40 minute club race by ONLY 5 minutes.

IF they can keep this up then they'll slash off 6 whole days of the record. But that is a big if Indeed

I say that that is pretty impressive so far.


Wouter

To break hotly contested records you need three out of three of:

* Good enough boat.
* Good enough crew (including weather team).
* Good enough luck with the weather systems.

The weather bit could block even the best possible boat/crew combo: Groupama could end up going slower than IDEC!

So far so good though.

/Martin