Winner of Vendée Globe Single-handed, Around-the-World Sailboat Race Guided by SP90m GNSS Receiver

The Maître Coq IV, skippered by Yannick Bestaven, beat a field of thirty-three competing 60-foot foiling monohull sailboats.

In one or the closest finishes in the race’s history, Bestaven’s Maître Coq IV completed the 24,000-Mile voyage in 80 days 3 hours 44 minutes 46 seconds, two hours ahead of the second-place finisher. An extreme endurance test for both sailor, boat and equipment, the Vendée Globe is widely considered the ultimate challenge in ocean racing.

The race started November 8, 2020 in Les Sables-d’Olonne in the Département of Vendée in France and finished there January 28, 2021. Competitors sailed unassisted in a non-stop circumnavigation from Les Sables- d’Olonne south in the Atlantic Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, then east in the Southern Ocean clockwise around Antarctica, keeping Australia’s Cape Leeuwin and South America’s Cape Horn to the left; and then back north in the Atlantic returning to finish in Les Sables-d’Olonne.

The Spectra Geospatial SP90m won praise from Bestaven. “The outstanding precision of the SP90m helped the central navigation system pilot the boat extremely well to enable me to place the boat exactly where I wanted.” He added that Spectra Geospatial and its distributor, Cadden, had provided excellent technical assistance and that he hoped to continue the collaboration in the future.

With 480-channel tracking and dual GNSS antenna inputs, the SP90m delivered continuous position information for integration with a separate attitude information source. The entire package of position, heading and attitude was provided to the boat’s autopilot. Minimal size, low power consumption and rugged design were key to selection of the SP90m and its success in helping bring home the winner in the hostile marine environment far from land with no GNSS corrections.