Team Francesca Clapcich Powered by 11th Hour Racing in The Ocean Race Atlantic - Day 4

The conditions are absolutely brutal onboard 11th Hour Racing on day four of The Ocean Race Atlantic, but Francesca, Alberto, Will, and Elodie have not taken their collective foot off the gas and have increased their lead at the front of the fleet.

During the past 24 hours their advantage over second-placed United by the Ocean, skippered by Paul Meilhat, has gone from around 11 nautical miles to 25, which means the team on 11th Hour Racing have been pushing hard even in conditions that most sailors could not handle.

Behind United by the Ocean, the brand new DMG Mori Global One, skippered by Kojiro Shiraishi, is holding third place, 35 miles behind 11th Hour Racing, while Team Maliza is in fourth position, just over 100 miles off the pace after sustaining damage to a foil casing following an impact.

In her latest video from onboard, Francesca looked pretty stressed in a dark and violently shaking cockpit. She spoke against a background of enormous crashes and constant howling, as 11th Hour Racing powered to the east on a broad reach driven by strong southerly winds and big breaking seas.

"We have had hard conditions through the night," she said. "We have 30 knots of wind - we are trying to get out of this strong pressure - probably another five or six hours like this.

"It is super full-on," she added, "it is impossible to rest onboard. We are just trying to keep everyone in one piece and the boat in one piece. You can't really move around. We are trying to stay safe - we keep pushing and getting some miles in."

This morning the boat had reached the approximate halfway point in the 3,200-mile race to Lorient and was positioned about halfway between St John's in Newfoundland and Ponta Delgada in the Azores.

In another message from onboard, Julien Champolion, the team's Onboard Reporter said the conditions were as bad as he had ever seen. He said the first three days of the race feel like they've taken a week. "That's what runs through my head lying in my beanbag, waiting for us to get through this front," he wrote.

"It'll take 30 hours for it to open the door on the east side of our Atlantic. Of the few hundred miles I've done on an IMOCA, I've rarely met a front this hard to swallow - 25/30 knots established and a proper messy sea."

Champolion said lying down is the safest position to be when the boat is moving around so wildly: "Eyes closed most of the time or vision blocked - so the brain reaches for other senses to read the environment - sound, feel, touch. And sometimes it stretches the truth a little: 'This is too fast, something's going to break, this isn't reasonable...'