I was also slightly hungover and incredibly exhausted. I had just come off a week of Level 3 training. And while my grand plan had been to head to my hotel for an early night, I had instead ended up at The Castle with two guys from the prior week of training, Tony (also from Telemed) and Terence. There were a few other Telemed people there, so I got to meet them early. Then there was a late curry, a very late arrival at the hotel, and an early alarm. Not the ideal start.
There were twelve boats full of crew for this final week of training, and I ended up running into loads of people from all the way back to my Level 1. There was a great buzz around, lots of people meeting or catching up as we queued to get our official race kit. I then got down to the boat and started to meet people. The first thing that hit me was that we had four Marks on the boat -- Canadian Mark (also known as Cameraman Mark, as he was shooting for Discovery), Irish Mark, English Mark, and American Mark (me). Somehow, only English Mark managed to get reliably called by a nickname over the course of the week, Jenko. I think the crew allocation folks might want to think about this name issue in the future. Alternatively, the Telemed crew can get better about nicknames.
I also got to meet Diane, our skipper, for the first time. She’s very enthusiastic, very positive, very… Canadian. She has a ton of experience, though a lot of it is in solo racing. I’ll admit, over the course of the week, I found her to be a bit too positive for my taste. That’s definitely better than the alternative, but I did get to feel a bit more push would get more out of us. But then, that could just be me, and maybe her style is will be perfect for most of the crew. And she did maintain that positive approach through a few incidents, of which more later.
The first day was pretty straightforward. There was a cool synchronised start of all the boats, and we headed out into the Solent to cruise around for a few hours, practicing basic tacks, gybes, and reefs as a crew. We also did an MOB drill, where I volunteered to be the swimmer, i.e. the rescuer. (The rescued is referred to as the ‘casualty’.) It was the first time I’d done that, and while we did retrieve the casualty pretty smoothly, I really needed to get myself lowered in quicker. After a bit more sailing, we anchored for the night.
Things got a bit more complicated the next day. We had a bit of trouble getting the anchor up. I'll spare you the detail, but we basically had to use the halyards to pull chain way up, then swap to another halyard and repeat. Took a long time. At one point, I managed to get myself between the chain and the guard rail. More embarrassing than anything, and I did think for a moment I was going into the water, until I managed to get out from under it. We then went off to do some practice racing. We started with a practice Le Mans start (never mind what that means), which went OK, though we weren't as prepared as a many of the other boats.
We then went for a normal start to kick off a practice race to France and back. In a regular start, there is a starting line between two points (generally a buoy and an official's boat) that you can't cross before a given time. There is a lot of maneuvering beforehand to a) get to the line immediately at that time and b) be in a good position relative to the other boats. We got in a pretty good start and made our way to the first mark, a buoy we needed to round before working our way back up the Solent and turning south once we cleared the Isle of Wight to head down to France.
Except we hit the buoy. And it was… somewhat my fault.
In short, I was on the main sheet, which controls how much the boom is centered or out wide. The call was to tack, then bear away. When bearing away, I needed to ease out the main sheet. Diane had been telling me I needed to do this faster, and I picked the wrong time to over-correct, easing immediately after we tacked when we really needed to sail for a bit first. This took the power out of our sail and the tide took us into the buoy. Better communication could have prevented this, or quickly getting the engine started, or (I think) immediately bearing away at the cost of missing the mark instead of trying to make it regardless, all of which is why I don’t consider it entirely my fault. But I definitely had a role. That said, no fingers were pointed, and it wasn’t until the end of the week that I discussed it with Diane, and I was the one who brought it up. She said we should share responsibility, which felt right. Still, the fact that I had to bring it up reinforced my “maybe too positive” opinion of her. I’ve been debating whether to give her that feedback. For now, it’s just for you readers! We’ll see how things go when we’re racing.
Anyway, the buoy put a small hole in the fiberglass of the boat, so we had to go back into the marina to get it checked out. (It wasn’t close to going all the way through. There is a foam core, but you don’t want the foam getting wet, so we wanted to repair the fiberglass.) This meant we were out of the race and out of action for a few hours. But we did get headed out in the evening with a plan to head part way across the Channel and rendezvous with the other boats on their way back the next day.
As the sun was setting and we headed south through some chop, I noticed one of the forward hatches wasn’t well closed. I made my way forward to sort it out and got a little taste of what it was like in the bow under rough conditions as we bounced around with occasional swells washing over the deck. I then got a much bigger taste of seawater as we crashed through a bigger one, not enough to knock me down, but enough to soak me head to toe.
The next day, the chop continued. It wasn’t huge, but it was bouncy, and probably half the crew were sick. I was feeling pretty rough myself, though whether it was borderline seasickenss or just exhaustion, I don’t know. Fortunately, I was on mother watch, which meant I was pulled out of regular duty to cook, but I could sleep when I wasn’t cooking. I took partial advantage of this, but also spent a fair amount of our watch up on deck just to get the air. Credit to Han, who probably did 75% of the mother work while Jo and I were feeling rough. And credit to Jo, who despite feeling like hell, peeled potatoes for the night’s mash as she lay in her bunk. Fortunately, by the next day, people were getting used to it and feeling a bit better.
We caught up with the rest of the fleet the next day and started a second practice race. This one went a lot better for us. We were a bit slow getting the spinnaker up, but it all went smoothly for us, which is more than some of the other boats could say. We rounded a mark off the west end of the Isle of Wight and headed down toward France in fourth place, maintaining that position and some decent speed until I went off watch at 8pm. But when I came back on at midnight, the wind had died and we were barely moving. Tom, one of the more experienced sailors in the crew, got our watch trying a bunch of new things with the sails. We dropped the staysail to give the Yankee unobstructed wind. We eased the main way out. We tried wing-on-wing, with the main to port and the Yankee to starboard. All of this got us a few knots of boat speed, but we still weren’t doing much. At least we could see the Normandy coast, but as we finished watch at 4am, we were still a long way away from the mark we were supposed to be rounding. When we came back on at 8am, it was dead calm. We were actually moving backward with the tide. Most of the boats were in similar conditions, though one had managed to make the mark. Apparently, the skipper really knew the area and made good use of the tidal currents. Anyway, word came in shortly after that we were abandoning the race to motor back up to the UK.
Along the way, we rendezvoused with Mission Performance and Derry-Londonderry to practice towing and ship-to-ship transfers. We also went for a swim in the middle of the Channel. The water was cold but really refreshing, and it was pretty cool diving in when you couldn’t see land anywhere around. That night, we ran another MOB drill, my first at night. Coincidentally, I ended up as rescue swimmer again, but I didn’t actually get put in the water. Don’t want to make these drills any more complicated than they have to be! As we were pulling up the anchor the next day, we had another minor incident, as Alex got hit in the head with the anchor. Not nearly as bad as it sounds, as it wasn’t a very hard knock, but it was a sharp, muddy edge, so we went back in to port so he could get it cleaned up at stitched at A&E. So, despite the plan to stay out for seven days straight, we ended up with a few return trips.
Our final night at anchor, we played a fleet-wide trivia game, posing questions over the radio. Our first question, “How many bones in the human foot?” When nobody got the answer, we realised that the answer, 26, was the same as our boat number, CV-26, and used that as a clue. We then made a theme of this. “How many letters in the alphabet?” Or my contribution, “If you have a Jefferson, and Lincoln, and a Washington, how many dollars do you have?” What can I say? It was the end of a long week.
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Here is a video shot during the training week by Canadian Mark. You can see me relaying winch instructions while Linda is up doing her rig check. I'm also the swimmer going in during the MOB drill. I did give a few short interviews, but that seems to have been left on the cutting room floor!
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