French skipper Stéphane Le Diraison crossed the finish line of the Vendée Globe this Thursday night on his Time for Oceans at 21:36hrs UTC taking 18th place and narrowly missing out on going one better, after a close match race with Swiss skipper Alan Roura which has gone on for the last week of their race. The two, racing very similar Finot Conq designs built for the 2008-9 Vendée Globe, were at times racing within sight of each other, their head-to-head reprising a match race to the finish line of the last Route du Rhum, with Le Diraison finishing just over 2 hours behind the young Swiss skipper.

Calm and contented, the stress gone, Alan Roura was a picture of happiness as he was reunited with his baby daughter Billie and his wife Aurelia minutes after finishing his second Vendee Globe in 17th position on La Fabrique...here are Alan's first words after finishing. 

Alan Roura, the young Swiss skipper of La Fabrique, crossed the finish line of the Vendée Globe at 19:29:56hrs UTC today (Thursday 11^th February) to secure 17th position after 95 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 56 seconds of racing. Completing his second Vendée Globe today at just 27 years of age, Roura was the youngest competitor among the 33 solo skippers who left Les Sables d’Olonne on Sunday November 8^th.

Gracious, serene and with a smile which lit up his Press Conference, here are some of the words from Japan's Kokiro Shiraish
 

What is the outstanding thing about this Vendée Globe, is it your memory of the Southern Ocean or repairing your mainsail, what is the main thing that stands out?
“ The first thing is that I am really grateful to everyone who has followed me and enabled me to finish this Vendée Globe, there were a lot of new things during this race for me and the team. The first is I did this Vendee Globe with a new boat. And I had not talked about this before but one year before the start I had a big heart surgery. And there were other things but I never imagined my mainsail would tear as fast as it did during the race but with the good advice of my team over the period of a week I managed to find the time and the resources to repair my mainsail and go on to finish.”

Kojiro Shiraishi, the 53 year old Japanese solo skipper of DMG MORI, crossed the finish line off Les Sables d’Olonne at 10:52:58hrs UTC this Thursday 11th February to take 16th place in the Vendée Globe and in so doing become the first ever Asian skipper to complete the famous non stop solo race around the world. Shiraishi’s elapsed time for his race is 94d 21hrs 32mins and he finishes 14d 17hrs 48m 10s behind Yannick Bestaven and 2hrs 56mins behind Arnaud Boissieres.