Ellen Macarthur and Alain Gautier again proved what a winning team they can be from the beginning of the Transat Jaques Vabre. The two handed trans Atlantic race left Le Havre at 9 am on the 5th November, and faced a direct and gruelling course straight to Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Macarthur and Gautier pulled away from the field of fourteen 60 foot multihulls in good conditions and a 20 knot breeze to cross the line of the first stage in first position.

Ellen & Alain onboard FONCIA

The start of the race had been overshadowed, quite literally by a big low pressure sweep coming in from the east over the Atlantic. The organisers had felt that the 50 ft. multihulls, and the monohulls could be safely allowed to start the race on the 1st November, but kept back the larger vessels.

As it turned out, the monohulls were battered by 50 knot winds that led, sadly, to three competitors abandoning their craft and heading for safety.

The course has now been changed, to a direct course of approximately 4,340 miles, from Le Havre to Brazil, keeping the miles travelled to the same length for both mono and multihull boats. In order to do this the Ascension Islands were cut out of the multihull course. This led to calculations of an arrival time of 17th November for Ellen in the high speed ORMA.

By 12th November Ellen Macarthur and Alain Gautier were 180 miles north of the Cape Verde islands, and feeling the effects of the Doldrums, an area notorious for unstable and light wind conditions, as the north east trades collide with the south east winds from the other side of the equator.

The ORMA position showed no change.

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Article added 17 December 2003