After playing cards below deck on Monday, the crew of Alegre (GBR) played the perfect hand in the witching hours of the night to slip inside Rosebud (USA) and find sufficient breeze to keep her moving forward.
At the same time, Moneypenny (USA), which had taken a more offshore line from Stromboli, hit a similar patch of wind to the north. Moneypenny and Alegre converged at around 03.30 CET and have been locked together ever since.
If the crew of Rosebud experienced a gut-wrenching sensation during this period, it may have been soothed by the thought that this had happened before in the race and the elastic binding the fleet would soon bring her rivals back. At daybreak, the extent of the horizon job would have become only too apparent.
Wind forward to 1700 CET in the afternoon and the normally convivial Roger Sturgeon's misery was complete.
Andres Soriano's Alegre and Jim Swartz's Moneypenny have been flying along at between 10 and 12 knots of boatspeed since the early hours of the day and at press time they were half-way between Pantelleria and Lampedusa, the bottom mark of the 607-nautical mile course.
They look to be in steady wind from the southeast and are likely to have a fast reach back to Malta once they make the final turn. It took Rosebud some 12 hours to completely break her shackles and reach the winds that are cooling the Mediterranean south of Sicily, but have refused to venture north.
Such is the nature of yacht racing. The rich - Moneypenny and Alegre - got a whole lot richer, while the poor - the other 70 boats still racing - hit the poverty line.
Will Best, the navigator on the Mills 68, Alegre, took time out to explain what he believed happened.
"We were the most inshore boat and got some great little patches of breeze, which just kept us moving," he said.
"We looked buried at one point in the bay of Castellammare, and this is where we think Rosebud gybed out in search of more wind. We were then set up to be the first to get any wind with some south in it. It came quite quickly once we were around Capo San Vito and enabled us to stay inside Moneypenny too."
The critical point in the battle between Alegre and Rosebud was played out between 2000 CET (Monday) and midnight.
Alegre dived inshore, lost ground and for four hours sailed slowly behind Rosebud, which was sailing the more direct course to Capo San Vito.
Just before midnight it all changed. Alegre kept moving from parcel of wind to another. More than once Rosebud came to a grinding halt, a combination of circumstances from which she did not recover until midday.
The top guns on Moneypenny, which include Gavin Brady and Francesco de Angelis, took the STP 65 on a more northerly route across the top of Sicily from Stromboli. Out of sight of the fleet, it must have surprised her to bump into Alegre yesterday morning as they converged just north of Trapani.
Both got wind either side of Rosebud and are now tied together in a drag race to the finish. The best estimated time of arrival for these two is around 0400 CET this morning.
Looking at the remainder of the fleet's progress has been a truly depressing sight.
The southeasterly helping the leaders on their way has been within sniffing distance of the westernmost tip of Sicily all day, but has refused to move north of the Egadi Islands.
At one point RAN (GBR) looked odds on favourite for a podium finish. Whilst she was third overall on corrected time at Favignana, RAN could be hard pressed to keep her time on the smaller boats following her, let alone the faster ones ahead.
Spare a thought for the backmarkers. Georges Bonello DuPuis, on Escape (MLT), said: "We're going nowhere fast... just dreadful. Still lots of others around us and the menu remains good."
Elsewhere, Nisida (GBR) called in at 1600 CET to mark the fact that "we were finishing at this time last year" and just to put this race into perspective.
At press time, David Frank's Strait Dealer was the first Maltese boat on the water.
Today should see the clock counting down for the fleet to determine the corrected time winner. Seventy-seven yachts started the race. Six have retired so far.