New Zealand skipper Grant Dalton has made a telling break on the fleet in the non-stop round-the-world The Race.
Dalton's giant catamaran Club Med yesterday had a 62-mile lead on the nearest rival, American Team Adventure, as the boats smashed their way into the Southern Ocean. It is a lead he
expects will snowball over the next day.
"This is the first break of any significance in this race so far," Dalton said. "We are in the south and we won the south. We fought hard for it and we got it."
The race is now a quarter of the way through, and Dalton is confident the winner will set a new circumnavigation record.
"At the moment we are 11 days ahead of the record," he said. "I can see us going around the world in 60 days if we carry on like this.
"And we think it's been quite slow so far, upwind all the way."
The fastest trip around the globe was 71 days - but it was on a different course, starting and finishing in the French port of Brest.
The Race began and ends in Barcelona, so the winning time will still be a record.
While Club Med was enjoying 18 knots yesterday, Team Adventure was still struggling in a ridge of high pressure.
"We're crawling south," complained skipper Cam Lewis.
Another boat back, the crew on French cat Innovation Explorer revealed they had lost further ground while they tried to fix a badly damaged reacher sail.
"It's nerve wracking that we are losing 48 hours to repair a sail while we should be catching up with the other boats," said the only woman in the race, Elena Caputo-Novak.
Innovation Explorer had slipped back to 175 miles in arrears of Club Med.
The back-marker in the fleet, Britain's Team Legato, is 2450 miles off the pace - still to cross the Equator. Polish boat Warta Polpharma reached the invisible line yesterday.
After withdrawing from The Race with serious sail problems, PlayStation is now making its way to Miami.
