No GPS. No weather routing. No help. Just boats, sextants and questionable judgment.
On September 6, 2026, a bunch of people will leave Les Sables-d’Olonne and deliberately make their lives miserable.
They will sail around the world.
Alone.
Non-stop.
Without GPS.
Without weather routing.
Without pulling into the nearest marina when things get ugly.
Which, obviously, is exactly why we should watch.
The Golden Globe Race is sailing stripped back to the bone. The boats are old-school heavy displacement cruisers. The navigation is celestial. The ocean is still the ocean, which means it doesn't give a damn about your entry form, your sponsorship deal or how many Instagram followers you have.
The fleet will head south through the Atlantic, around Cape of Good Hope, across the Southern Ocean, around Cape Leeuwin, through the terrifyingly large bit between Australia and Cape Horn, then north again toward France.
About 30,000 miles.
One person.
One boat.
Eight months or so of cold, storms, loneliness, broken gear, bad food and conversations with yourself that you will probably wish you hadn't started.
And then there are the skippers.
Some are veterans returning for another go. Some have already sailed thousands of miles alone. Some have military backgrounds. Some have raced professionally.
And then there is Louis Kerdelhué.
Twenty-one years old.
Which means he is either exceptionally brave or has not yet fully understood what he has signed up for.
Perhaps both.
The boats are almost as interesting as the people. Rustler 36s, Tradewinds, Tashibas, Cape Georges, Sagas and other beautifully stubborn old yachts designed in an era when a cruising boat was expected to survive the ocean rather than provide a floating apartment with Wi-Fi.
And yet this isn't about nostalgia.
It is about removing everything you can remove and discovering what remains.
No electronic magic.
No instant answer.
No routing algorithm telling you that there is a 23-minute weather window between two pieces of hell.
Just a skipper, a sextant, a windvane, a battered boat and the world's largest playground trying to kill him.
The previous races showed how brutal the game is. In 2018, Jean-Luc Van Den Heede won after 211? No. Forget the numbers. The important part is that he came back.
In 2022, only five sailors finished.
Kirsten Neuschäfer won.
The rest became stories.
That's the Golden Globe.
Winning is important.
Finishing is heroic.
Surviving is the whole fucking point.
And this year we'll get to watch it from our sofas.
The 2026 fleet will carry trackers, so we can follow their positions. Better still, the organisers are introducing a 24/7 GGR Window, bringing live images from the boats themselves to the outside world.
Which means you can sit comfortably at home, drinking coffee, watching someone 10,000 miles away get smacked in the face by the Southern Ocean.
Human progress is a wonderful thing.
The race starts September 6.
I'll be watching.
https://goldengloberace.com/2026-ggr/
Because sometimes the best thing about sailing is not having to do it yourself...
If you laughed, learned something, or simply wasted five good minutes... Buy me a coffee☕️. It’s like tipping your bartender, except your bartender is on a leaky sailboat⛵️👇