BREST, France: Frenchman Francois Gabart smashed the world record for the fastest non-stop solo navigation of the globe on Sunday, completing the mammoth feat in 42 days, 16 hours, 40 minutes and 35 seconds.
The 34-year-old sailor crossed a virtual finish line between the island of Ushant off France’s northwest tip and Lizard Point in southwest England at 0145 GMT, comfortably beating the previous record set by compatriot Thomas Coville last year by six days and 10 hours.
Moments before crossing the finish line Gabart, a father of two and engineer by trade, sent out an emotional video showing his boat’s progress on a computer monitor.
“The little blue is us, the red line is the finish. We should cut it soon, the computer says 30 seconds,” he said, wiping his eyes.
The race time was announced by an observer from the World Sailing Speed Council but will be subject to checks of the boat’s black box and its GPS data before final confirmation.
Gabart becomes just the fourth title-holder for a world record of sailing the globe solo without stopping.
Huge leaps have been made in that time — since the record was first set in 2004, nearly 30 days have been shaved off.
The debut record holder was Frenchman Francis Joyon who completed the odyssey in 72 days and 22 hours.
British female sailor Ellen MacArthur took to the seas a year later, racing against the clock to break that record by just a day and a half (71 days, 14 hours).
She remained undefeated until 2016 when Coville set a new record of 49 days and three hours which many predicted would be difficult to topple.
But Gabart’s 30-meter long new generation MACIF maxi-trimaran comfortably carved its way through the waves and into the record books.
Helped by good weather throughout much of the voyage, particularly during the long and arduous Pacific section, it clocked up speeds of up to 35 knots (65 kilometers an hour).
He set a number of new solo race records along the way, including the fastest navigation of the Pacific (7 days, 15 hours, 15 minutes) and the longest distance covered in 24 hours (851 miles or 1,576 kilometers).
Gabart first circumnavigated the world during the 2013 Vendee Globe race — which he won. He immediately set his sights on breaking the solo non-stop record.
Coville congratulated his record vanquisher.
“He’s an incredible strategist. He already showed that during the Vendee Globe,” he said.
Of the four solo record holders, Gabart is the only won to have also won a competitive round the world race.
“It only confirms that he is talented, that he works hard and leads each project,” said Guillaume Combescure, one of the engineers who worked with Gabart.
“He has shown that dreams are a great motivator, that anything is possible,” he added.
Frenchman smashes record for non-stop solo sailing around the world
Frenchman smashes record for non-stop solo sailing around the world
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
