Picture of Groupama 3

In the fourth day of sailing since the start of the Route du Rhum La Banque Postale, Franck Cammas is continuing his fantastic cavalcade across the Atlantic.

Virtually at the midway mark, the skipper of Groupama 3 is maintaining his lead over the rest of the fleet with, a 293 mile lead over Idec and 298 over Sodebo at the 0700 GMT position report.

There is a worrying drop in speed of Gitana 11 over the past few hours of racing: 12 knots over 4 hours and just 2.2 over the past thirty minutes. After Sidney Gavignet's retirement yesterday it is to be hoped that nothing serious has happened aboard the winning trimaran from the last edition of this transatlantic race.

Contacted this morning during a live video with BFM, Franck Cammas explained that he was sailing in fairly unstable S'ly winds, both in terms of strength and direction. As a logical consequence of this situation, the skipper of Groupama 3 is only getting a little sleep: "No more than 20 to 25 minutes in a row, if that. However, I must be getting little flashes of sleep without really realising

Westbound under automatic pilot, Franck is devoting the bulk of his time to trimming so as to enable Groupama 3 to gently negotiate the sudden increases in breeze on fairly flat seas. Such activity is accompanied by manoeuvres on deck so as to reduce the massive mainsail and switch headsails. As he is till positioned to the North of the Azores, Thomas Coville hasn't begun to negotiate the front we spoke of yesterday

Behind Franck, Francis Joyon is on the attack, polled doing 27 knots of instantaneous speed. Day 5 promises some interesting sailing.