"Eternity is the sea gone with the sun", wrote Rimbaud. Woody Allen, on the other hand, thought that "eternity is a long time, especially towards the end". These two quotations could well have inspired some of the Class40 skippers on Saturday: the survivors of the calm, who were freed on the finish line in the morning, and the others, still stuck between the tip of Spain and Morocco. Yesterday, six new duos made landfall after a long night chasing the slightest breath of wind:  "It wasn't just the night that was long, joked Aurélien Ducroz (Crosscall) in the early hours of the morning.  It wasn't all polish, but it was beautiful. We saw some great places. Now I know how to make the boat work well in the light airs. We got trapped on the first night when we were side by side with Pirelli. They left and we spent six hours there. And from there, there was no way of doing anything! We spent two hours in Minorca, two hours in Ibiza. Each time, Pep (editor's note: Costa, his Spanish co-skipper, a native of Barcelona) said to me: "This is my favourite place!

Arriving shortly after Crosscall, Mathieu Claveau and Christophe Fialon on "Prendre la mer - Agir pour la forêt" were in high spirits, happy to be in first place among the "sharp" Class40s.

"This race was great from start to finish. Strategically, we did what we wanted to do and were soon up with the scows. After that, we battled hard with Phénix all the way to the bottom of Spain. And to be the first to reach the point is quite something. The boat is fifteen or twenty years old and the mainsail is made of old materials. Everything was great, even if it was a bit long at the end... ".

"Longuet at the end", François Verdier also found. " I've never done that much, acknowledged the skipper of "HaPlus PME - Phénix" with Pierre-Laurent Garnero. Even at the end, just before the line, we were making slow progress and we thought we were going to stay there for a few metres. There's nothing wrong with that, that's racing. But we showed the others a bit too much where they shouldn't go. We both got on really well and we're really happy to be here, it's a great course.

Glaces Romane-Guérir en mer (Laurent Camprubi - Samuel Buissart), Hydra (Nicolas Toury - Pierre Vaton) and Maiia (Benoît Garibal - Paul Brandel) followed in quick succession. To sum up the general opinion, Nicolas Toury said: "On this MedMax, there was everything: beautiful islands, beautiful landscapes, friends to sail with. And wind: some more, some less. Benoît Garibal, in partnership with Paul Brandel on "Maiia", summed it up: "We experienced fifteen races in one".  That says it all.

The three other Class40 entrants - Qwanza-Beixa (Goulven Marie - Nasser Arrais), Sotraplants-TRS (Matthieu Foulquier-Gazagnes - Xavier Brohers) and Rêve à partir de vue (Joël Paris - Thibaut Lecarpentier) - were still at sea at the end of the day, slowly approaching the Moroccan coast.