News
Sunday, December 7, 2025: Tropical tango
Endless doldrums! The Intertropical Convergence Zone is not being kind to the all-female crew of The Famous Project, which it began to slow down on Friday evening and does not intend to release before Sunday evening, continuing to swell in the path of the maxi trimaran. Nevertheless, the boat is progressing steadily southward and is approaching the Equator this morning, currently about a hundred miles away.
With the crossing of this important marker and the passage into the southern hemisphere, Alexia Barrier, Dee Caffari, Annemieke Bes, Rebecca Gmür Hornell, Deborah Blair, Molly LaPointe, Támara Echegoyen, and Stacey Jackson expect not only Neptune's protection and blessing, but also, more practically, access to the famous southeast trade winds. These well-established winds, which blow from the coast of South Africa to the north of Brazil, allow sailors to bypass the high-pressure system centered on St. Helena in the middle of the South Atlantic. The giant trimaran will therefore change hemispheres in upwind conditions. Its relatively eastern position will give it an interesting angle to the wind to lengthen its strident more reaching conditions. This will be an opportunity for Alexia and her Angels to “cut through the Atlantic corners” away from the Brazilian coast. All minds on board will then turn to the transition with the disturbed systems of the southern ocean, a boulevard towards the other major landmarks of this Jules Verne Trophy, the Cape of Good Hope and its neighbor, Cape Agulhas, which marks the entrance into the Indian Ocean, hopefully within a week from today.
Alexia Barrier and the Doldrums
“Here, you go from one knot to three knots, from three to six, then to eight, and suddenly a new cloud arrives and... nothing. Four knots. Two knots. Zero. We move forward, then we don't, then we do, then we don't at all.
It's a tropical tango: unpredictable and sticky.”