34° 58' S, 117° 52' E -- Pre Leg 4, Albany, WA

I made it to Albany in time... which is more than I can say for my boat. After some problems early on out of Cape Town, the team had climbed back to ninth place, fighting for eighth, when they took a gamble, broke away from the rest of the fleet, and tried to get around an area of light winds. It didn't work. Instead, they ended up completely becalmed and had to fire up the engine just to get in two days before the start of the next race and a day-and-a-half behind the next-to-last boat. At the time, I liked the idea of taking the risk, and while I know hindsight is 20/20 and all that, when something fails this spectacularly, you have to wonder if it was foreseeable. In any event, I wasn't actually out there. Talking to people when they got in, opinion was mixed. The move doesn't seem to have had full buy-in from the crew, and a few people think they didn't even have a say, much less a chance to get out-voted. Other people are just looking at it as one of those things that happens and a learning experience. It remains to be seen how it actually plays out in the next races.

As mitigation, I told the guys they didn't really need more than two days in Albany anyway. It's a nice enough town, but there isn't a lot to it. We had the prize giving and a bit crew party my first night here. I hiked up one of the 'mountains' in town to the Desert Mounted Corps Memorial. Part of the road was lined with trees, each dedicated to an Australian who died in WW1, WW2, Korea, or Viet Nam. I didn't manage to make it to the ANZAC museum, but there are lots of markers around town about ANZAC and its role in Gallipoli.

We went out one day for a refresher sail. Most of it came back really well, but I know nothing is quite going to prepare me for being out in the open ocean except actually getting out there to do it. We had some dolphins alongside for a while, which was fun. We were out with LMAX, who have won two of three races so far, and I was hoping to get some sense from the skipper of what they were doing. Well, whatever they're doing, it wasn't apparent on that trip. He was pretty casual about everything, still getting us up to speed, but nothing that really stood out.

The race does seem to be a pretty big event in town. Sometimes local people would just strike up conversation about the race. Some people were spontaneously offered rides from the airport. When we were about to head out on the refresher sail, a woman stopped by with a box of pastries for our tea!

When our boat did get in, we spent a fair part of the last two days getting it ready to go out again. They had done a lot of cleaning while motoring back, but we had some to do to finish up. Then today there was more maintenance and packing up all the food for the next leg. For example, I spent about two hours peeling the labels off cans of food, then writing on them what's inside. The boat gets so wet sometimes, you can't rely on the labels staying on.

There was also disappointing news from two of the guys on the team, both of whom I knew from Level 4 training and really like, that they were cutting their race short despite originally planning to do the whole thing. Nick, an experienced sailor, decided he just didn't like the racing aspect that much, and it was too much time away from his wife. Even more, Tony has a five-year-old daughter that he was missing. He had been wavering back when we were training and had actually decided to cut back to Legs 1-4 before he even started. Both understandable decisions given their family situations -- I was more surprised they'd planned a year away in the first place than that they decided to cut it short -- but I'm sorry not to have them around.

One last note before heading out. Here's a picture of my bunk. One of my favorite comments on this trip, from James Ruthven, "Your cabin must not be very big." Well, no.

I have top bunk

Western Austtralia

Strictly speaking, this isn't about the race. But what the hell, I'll throw in a bit of a general travel writing.

I didn't spend a lot of time in Perth itself. Seemed like a nice enough town, but I really just took the first afternoon recovering from a 20 hour trip, most of it in a middle seat.

Selfie at Hangover Bay

The second day, I took a day trip north along the coast. I stopped for a swim at Hangover Bay, though without a hangover I felt I wasn't doing it quite right. The main destination was Pinnacles Desert, a spot where there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of stone formations sticking up out of the sand. It's really weird, not exactly spectacular but definitely interesting. Apparently, researchers aren't even quite sure how the formed, but they are pretty sure it has something to do with trees. They also suspect they've been buried by dunes for a few thousand years and only resurfaced in the last hundred or so.

In among the Pinnacles

 I saw my first wild kangaroos every as I was driving back that night, two varieties -- one live, one roadkill. I saw loads more during the rest of the trip, probably 70% roadkill, 20% near-roadkill (e.g one that went out if its way to trip hop in front of me), and only about 10% frolicking about at a sensible distance from the road. Hardly seems like a ratio that's made for long-term success.

Looking down Busselton Jetty

The next day, I headed south toward Margaret River. I stopped in Busselton on the way, home to the longest wood-piled jetty in the Southern Hemisphere at 1.8km. It was long, but still not an amazing claim to fame. I later heard a radio commercial saying "There's more to Busselton that they longest wood-piled jetty in the Southern Hemisphere!" -- there is also a music festival -- and I was about 80% sure they were taking that seriously.

Sunset at Canal Rocks

Margaret Riven involved a day of wine tasting as well as some chocolate and olive oil makers. It was mostly small scale, less developed that wine tasting I've done elsewhere. At several, I was the only person there. At one, Ashbrook, I just chatted with the woman on the front desk while they were bottling in the back room. I eventually made my way to Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse and caught sunset from Canal Rocks, so-called because natural erosion has left what look like canals in the rock formation.

Crystals inside Calgardup Cave

I then headed south. There are a lot of caves in the region, and I managed to explore two. Calgardup Cave had a lot of cool crystal formations. Giants Cave was a lot bigger and deeper and was set up as an "adventure cave", which involved climbing ladders through narrow spots and scrambling along sections of fallen rock. I got down to Cape Leeuwin, the most south-western point in Australia and the meeting point of the Southern and Indian Oceans. Finally, I headed over to Albany via Denmark through some forests that just seemed to go on forever.

I liked WA a lot. If ti were closer, I'd come back for the wine country alone. Given the beaches, the deserts, the forests (and the diving, which I heard good things about but didn't manage to try), it could be worth a return trip despite how far away it is from everything.

Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse

Thanksgiving 2015

I'm not going to lie, this wasn't a great Thanksgiving.

This is not, of course, to say it was a bad day. I met up with a few of the other people who are joining my boat here in Albany. And I got to catch up with a bunch of people from other boats who I met during training. It was great to hear their stories of the trip so far, even though a lot of them revolved around how much hard work the trip from Cape Town had been and how cold and wet everything was. There was the prize giving ceremony for the last leg and a big party that went late into the night.

But it wasn't Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, and it's meant to be spent with friends and family. I knew with the timing of the race that wasn't going to happen this year. I was thinking it would at least be spent with my team, which would have been in the right spirit and would also have brought a few other Americans, but they're running really late (more on that later) and aren't expected in for a few more days.

Anyway, I can be thankful that a "not great" Thanksgiving can still be this good. And thanks for all the support and good wishes for this trip from family and friends, even if I couldn't celebrate with any of you in person.

What are the odds?

I recently realised that I'm starting this race in Albany, WA and finishing in Seattle... WA!

Coincidence? Well, yeah.

What am I doing?

As I finished work last week, as I'm less than a week away from leaving London, as I'm less than a month away from starting sailing, and as I'm reading about yet another tough start to a leg, I've been asking myself that question quite a bit. That is not, however, the point of this post. Instead, I've realised that while people generally know that I'm going sailing for a while, a lot of people don't know more that that. So I figured it would make sense, as I'm now getting ready to go and promoting this blog, to share that background, or at least the elevator pitch....

I'm crewing a racing yacht on part of a round-the-world race, going from Albany (south of Perth, Western Australia), to Seattle, via Sydney, Hobart, Airlie Beach (Queensland), Da Nang, and Quingdao. I'll be sailing about 16,000 miles over five months. It's a crew of twenty amateur sailors (except the skipper, who's a very experienced professional). The crew range have a wide range of experience, from some who have done a lot of fairly serious sailing to 'never sailed before in their life'. I'm somewhere in the middle, having always been interested in sailing, but never having done much before getting into this.

Yes, it's a race. Or maybe it's more of a race series, as it isn't as simple as 'fastest boat around the world wins'. Points are awarded for each individual port-to-port race. There are bonus points for hitting scoring gates and for being the fastest through sprint sections. There are penalty points, mainly for damage to the boat. Winning team gets bragging rights. There might be a trophy. Twelve boats are racing, all identical design.

I didn't pick my crew, though I've met a number of them through training. The race organisers put the crews together, balancing the experience levels, the legs people are looking to do, and other skills (e.g. I understand they try to distribute doctors around the boats as much as possible). They also seem to group on nationality -- ours is a very North American boat, with some other boats appearing to skew Australian, French, etc.

I was drawn into this by the posters on the Tube. Apparently, it's a hugely successful advertising campaign for them. If you're in London, you've probably seen them, people with half the picture in their normal clothes, half in race gear. I got on their mailing list probably five years ago. I went down a two-and-a-bit years ago to see the boats at St Katherine's Dock and talk to some people who had done it. Early this year, I was thinking that the stars of my personal and professional life were lined up about as well as they would ever by for something like this, so it was time to give it a serious look. In March, I did a training week to see what it was really like. It was cold. It was hard work. But I decided it was time to do it.

Initially, I had thought I would do the full round-the-world or not do it at all, but I dialed that back a bit. My notice period at work and my desire to stick around for the World Cup aligned nicely to a start with Leg 4 from Western Australia. Legs 5 and 6 looked like some great sailing and meant I would get to cross the Pacific. I would really have liked to do Leg 7 as well, go through the Panama Canal, and be able to claim a nice round 'half way around the world', but it was fully booked. And so my race was planned. I probably could have burned some professional bridges, skipped a few World Cup games, and started earlier, and it would have been cool to go to Cape Town and sail the Southern Ocean, but I felt that as long as I had the Pacific crossing, I had the super-heavy sailing aspect covered.

One other reason I backed off doing the full thing. Initially, I thought it would mean I would be at sea for the full Presidential campaign. Once I realised I'd be back on land for the worst of it regardless, I gave up. Trump. Clinton. Ugh.

One last thing in what at this point would only be an elevator pitch in the Burj Dubai, I am using this as a hook to raise some funds for GiveDirectly, an organisation that focuses on poverty relief in Kenya and Uganda. I will be matching donations, with an increased match based on how well our boat does. Please check out my fundraising campaign page for details.