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17th June 2013

French Sailor Smashes North Atlantic Speed Sailing Record By 16 Hours

Francis Joyon has shattered the North Atlantic record: 5 days, 2 hours, 56 minutes and 10 seconds or in other words a time that is 16 hours, 34 minutes and 30 seconds less than the previous record set by Thomas Coville in 2008.

Over the final stretch, Francis Joyon came very close to beating his own outright distance record over 24 hours (666.2 miles) and this enabled the Breton skipper to make important gains over the second half of the crossing, in spite of sailing some distance away from the Great Circle Route.

Published in Offshore

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William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago