Pushed far west for a week by Saint Helena’s High, Orange is struggling with a new and very similar high-pressure zone, a “cousin” of the former that is developing far south in a normally windy zone where Bruno Peyron was expecting anything except to be confronted by a rough sea and weak winds. Orange continues to head east, parallel to the depression systems of the Forties. Good Hope is approaching… the door of the Great South is yawning open. Still on track to set a reference time between Ushant and the southern point of Africa, the maxi catamaran Orange is slowly escaping the anticyclone’s clutches… “It’s Sunday in the South, the sea’s a little grey, heavy, three to four meters of swell,” reports Bruno Peyron. “The sun, a little white, is piercing through a low sky… Around us, we can see petrels, and sometimes, the arresting, fascinating vision of a ‘jumbo,’ the heavy, majestic silhouette of an albatross…”
