Monday September 26th 2011, Author: James Boyd, Location: France, Reposted from The Daily Sail

It has not been what you might call the fastest of starts for the Mini Transat. With an area of high pressure over northern Spain, the wind off the French coast remains light and as a result since starting at around 1700 local time yesterday the boats are only 50 or so miles down the race track, only around half of the way to the continental shelf. The boats which have erred furthest south have done best since the start with Hugo Lavayssiere on Ares and Co and Renaud Chavarria on Beziers Mediterranee leading the Series class and Jorg Reichers on mare.de ahead in the Protos. This is good in particular for Riechers who's boat was pranged in a pre-start collision with Bertrand Delesne's Mini yesterday.

The PredictWind GRIBs show that a northeasterly is forecast to fill in tonight as a dying front moves over the Bay of Biscay, however the situation remains largely the same until Wednesday, possibly making for the slowest ever run towards the northeast corner of Spain. A cold front is due to be approaching the Bay of Biscay from the west on Wednesday but even this is forecast to dissolve over the course of Thursday.

Among the Brits, Pip Hare on The Potting Shed has pulled up from 35th last night to 19th this morning in the Series class, while Lymington's Dan Dytch on Soitec is holding on to 25th among the Protos.

Click here to see the Daily Sail position chart

We'll sort out some charts showing the positions for tomorrow's update.