Sixteen skippers just left France with no electronic navigation
Location: Les Sables-d'Olonne, France
The Golden Globe Race started today from Les Sables-d'Olonne, on the French Atlantic coast. Sixteen skippers, sailing solo, left the marina two minutes apart, each one pointed at a non-stop, unassisted lap of the planet. No stops allowed. No outside help allowed. And the part that makes the race what it is: no GPS.
The boats still carry real safety gear: AIS so other ships can see them, and a sealed box holding an emergency GPS chart plotter and a satellite phone. That box is sealed for a reason. Break it open to find your position or call for help with anything short of a real emergency, and race rules say you've retired from the competitive fleet. You can keep sailing and finish the course, but you're reclassified into what the race calls the Chichester Class, named for the man who did this alone in 1966 with nothing but a sextant and a compass. The rule isn't "no safety gear." It's "the safety gear doesn't count as navigation."
So how do sixteen people actually find their way across three oceans? The same way sailors did before satellites existed. A sextant to measure the angle of the sun or a star above the horizon. A nautical almanac and a timepiece to turn that angle into a line on a chart. A compass to hold a course between fixes. Dead reckoning, speed and heading and elapsed time, to fill in the gaps between sights. It's slower than glancing at a screen, and it demands practice most sailors never bother to get, because why would you, when a $200 chartplotter does the job instantly.
I want to be careful about what this race has and hasn't shown, because it started this morning and a non-stop solo circumnavigation typically takes the better part of a year. Nobody has proven anything yet except that sixteen people were prepared enough to leave the dock. Attrition in this event has historically been high; sailing alone, without electronic navigation, for months at a time, tests boats and bodies in ways that expose problems a fully-crewed, fully-instrumented boat would never surface. Some of these sixteen won't finish. That's part of the honest story too.
Every boat should carry a GPS, full stop. What I'd ask you to take from this story instead is that the skill underneath the screen, understanding why your boat moves the way it does, reading the water and the sky, holding a course by feel and by chart, still works, and still matters, whether or not you ever turn off the electronics to prove it. That's the same argument this whole site is built on, just carried to its most extreme, most public version. Sixteen people just set off to cross oceans on the fundamentals alone, with the fallback locked in a box they're hoping never to open.
What's the difference between the Golden Globe Race and the Vendée Globe?
Both are solo, non-stop round-the-world races that start and finish at Les Sables-d'Olonne, but the Vendée Globe sails modern IMOCA foiling monohulls with full electronics, while the Golden Globe Race bans electronic navigation and uses production-style boats similar to what was available in 1968.
Is celestial navigation still taught to new sailors?
Rarely as a first skill. Most beginner instruction today starts with reading wind and water by eye and using GPS/chartplotters for position, with celestial navigation offered later as an advanced or offshore-specific course, if at all.
Do I need to learn a sextant to be a good sailor?
No. Understanding wind, water, and a paper chart matters far more day to day than celestial navigation, which is a specialized offshore skill. The lesson here is that the fundamentals underneath the electronics are what actually keep a boat safe, whether or not you ever pick up a sextant yourself.
Sources
- Golden Globe Race, official rules, goldengloberace.com, accessed 2026-09-06 (sealed emergency GPS/satellite phone, Chichester Class on breaking seal)
- "Golden Globe Race 2026: 16 marins repartent autour du monde comme en 1968", Actualités Nautisme, 2026-09-06
- "Sixteen expected for Golden Globe Race", Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 2026-09-03
