Cultural and other references, plus some follow-up

Turns out it is “make do” rather than “make due”.

In case you didn’t youtube it yourself, Barrier Reef

And just because I feel like sharing, two more of my favorite Old 97s songs, The Other Shoe and Big Brown Eyes.

“I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using.” As an aside, perhaps the most disappointing moment of my Sydney stop was when I failed to convince the kids of the friends I was staying with that we should watch Princess Bride. I think we ended up with Mission Impossible instead.

I’ve also been doing some thinking about the food/cooking/heat issue, and I’m not sure there’s the easy solution I was thinking there was. The problem with these meal bars is that most of them are focused on the diet market with some on the workout market. They’re designed to deliver protein and maybe broader nutrition without a lot of calories, not to sustain 5000 calories per day of exertion. And the ones that are more “energy” oriented are still too small to be more than supplements. And they’re expensive, at least compared to the budget we have, which I think is about £3 per person per day. You’d drop that on a single Cliff Bar! I still think we’re stupid to make porridge, as cold cereal is a perfectly good substitute, though that might be colored by the fact that I won’t eat porridge anyway. I’m not sure how to replace the rice/pasta calories without boiling a giant pot of water. Suggestions welcome.

One last thing. I mentioned a blow-up over some bunks. Never saw anything more come of that. The two people involved are working together as well as ever. No idea if they talked it out or just moved on, though I suspect the latter. There will probably be more such moments around the boat as we go. It’s a lot of people in a confined environment under a lot of stress and not getting a lot of sleep. I’m actually a bit surprised there haven’t been more.

Final run into Airlie Beach

This comes almost a week after we arrived, but much like the other times we hit port, there was a lot to do other than blog, some work and some relaxation. Still, there are a few points worth sharing.

First, having thought about it a bit, I feel my comment about how the other boats weren’t caught by the current may have come across more snarky than it was intended. The truth is, there is a lot of uncertainty and luck involved in these races, and while the results are clear, it’s good not to read too much into a small sample size. You really have to assess decisions based on what was known at the time and the process involved, and I just don’t have the experience to do that. Matt has made an effort to explain his decisions, and I think it’s helped to ensure buy-in. We ask a few questions, but I’m not sure if we effectively challenge his calls, or if we should. All that said, it’s only right to talk about his tactical decision around our finish, one that worked out well.

Basically, there were two options open to us as we approached Airlie Beach. First was a more direct route, going between Whitsunday Island and the mainland. Second was to go around the island and come back down toward Airlie Beach. The first, shorter route meant fighting a stronger tidal flow and risking getting caught in the wind shadow of the island. The second option avoided these risks but was substantially longer. We took the second option, and it did really well for us. We made up a lot of ground on the two boats ahead and almost sneaked a few points on the leader board.

Unfortunately though, it wasn’t quite enough., and we finished in eighth place. On the one hand, that’s a big drop given the amount of time we were in podium position and even first. On the other, it’s still not a bad finish, coming in within a few hours of the lead boats after eight days of racing. The fact we were able to do that well with only thirteen crew is also something we can take some pride in.

How big a deal is crew size? It’s not quite like defending a power play in hockey or having a man in the sin bin in rugby, because you’re not leaving anyone undefended. At the same time, most work on the boat ends up being a bit slower. It takes more time to move sails. Someone might have to switch reefing points at the mast, then take a few moments moving back to grind instead of someone else waiting there to do it immediately. You might only have one person to grind the spinnaker sheet when a larger crew could have four. But the bigger issue is just that everyone gets more tired. There is no opportunity for a break. I understand one boat had twenty-four crew for the last race, and the next smallest after our has seventeen. That’s a lot more people to spread the work around. Feels like we did pretty well, given what we had.

Albatross!

If you didn't get the initial reference, you probably won't find this funny. And if you did get the initial reference, you've probably already YouTubed this. But since I couldn't YouTube from the boat and I just have now, I figured I'd share the link.

Retroactive post

I just realized that my first post from the boat didn't go up due to technical issues. Specifically, I sent it to the wrong address. I've posted it retroactively. If you're a Blogowitz Blog completist (and why wouldn't you be?), you can find it here.

I'm also working on getting some photos from the race put together, and I hope to have them up in the next day or so. And there will be a brief post on my time in Sydney, but for now, just know it has been fun and relaxing.

40S, 126E (I think) -- Race 4, Day 4

So much for my plan for daily blog updates.

My plans to read Moby Dick, finish my podcast on the Civil War, and think deep thoughts are doing even worse.

This is the first time I've had the energy to do anything other than sleep while off watch. We're sailing upwind, generally 20-30 knots of wind, so we spend a lot of time heeled over pretty far. just moving around is a lot of work. The approximate position in the title is because the nav station is all the way at the back of the boat, and I really can't be bothered to go there.

The sailing itself is going OK. We had a good start and were in second for a bit, but we've since dropped back to eleventh. Part of that is tactics. We're in a group taking a slower route than some others, but it's shorter, and we think the weather looks positive in the long run. But we're also going slower than some of the others on the same route. We're deliberately spreading work around to get everyone up to speed on all roles, then really targeting the next two races. Still frustrating not doing better, but it feels like we're executing OK as a team.

The night sailing has been pretty spectacular. Some nights, we've had clear skies full of stars with a number of shooting stars. Last night was cloudy and inky black, with the only light coming from the phosphorescence of the water as we churned it up.

One thing I've been reminded of is that I don't like being the new, inexperienced guy. During training, I'd say I was as good as anyone, better than most, at least of the inexperienced sailors. Now though, some of those inexperienced sailors have crossed oceans. It's actually cool to see how far some of the guys I know have come and think I'll get there when I'm done with this. My watch leader, Barnaby, says he's one of those previously inexperienced sailors, but I don't believe him. He's really calm and measured and certainly seems to know his stuff cold. His only questionable decision so far came as victualler, when he planned pavlova for dessert the first night out. Very tasty, but it left him and Nick whipping cream with a fork for 45 minutes.

Time to prep for the next watch. Next update will come... when it comes.

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.

Sailing 101: Kitemares, spinnakers, and sailing downwind

If you've been following the race diaries so far, you will have seen a few reference to 'kitemares', including (but by no means limited to!) on my boat, Telemed. And, if you're not up on sailing jargon, you might be wondering what the hell that means, though you've probably figured out it isn't good. Thus this bit of Sailing 101....

The biggest, coolest, most powerful sail is not actually the main. It's the spinnaker, also known as the 'kite', also known as the 'Code'**. If you've seen a picture of a sailboat and said "Oooo, that's pretty!", odds are it was flying a spinnaker. They are big, billowy sails that fly out in front the boat. They tend to have more design work on them. (Other sails are generically referred to as 'white sails'.) And they are tricky. When things go wrong with a kite, they go wrong fast. And that's a kitemare.

** Code 1 is the biggest, Code 2 the medium, Code 3 the smallest. You don't really hear Code without the number, while kite gets used more generically. Similarly, the jibs are Yankee 1 to Yankee 3. Bad enough everything on a boat has a different name, often they have several!

Next question then: Why are spinnakers tricky? First, they're big and powerful. While that's good for making the boat go fast, it also means that all that force from the wind in a huge sail can make a real mess of things if it isn't rigged right, e.g. if a line is running inside something it should be outside of.

That brings us to the second reason, which is that spinnakers are rigged differently from the other sails. The main and the other headsails are attached to something solid along the whole of the leading edge, or luff. The spinnaker is just attached at the three corners. This lets it get a lot more curve in it, but it also makes it less stable. If you lose wind in your main or jibs, they'll flap around. At the most, you might get the Yankee a bit hung up on the inner forestay.** But they'll always be well supported and fairly easy to untangle. But there's a lot of extra spinnaker, and it's not attached to anything solid, so it can get wrapped around things much worse. There's a typical 'hourglass' where the middle part wraps around the forestay while the top and bottom stay open (you get the picture), but it can get wrapped around other things too. Or it can fall in the sea. Or it can come loose. Many, many ways for it to go wrong.

** The forestays are two metal cables that run from the mast to points in the bow. There is an inner and outer forestay. These are the "something solid" you attach the jibs to, with the luff of the Yankee on the outer forestay and the luff of the staysail on the inner forestay. At some point, I'll figure out how to explain all the jargon without just referring to more jargon.

Bigger picture, this is all linked to sailing downwind. You only use the spinnaker when you're going downwind. Upwind, you stick to the white sails. And sailing downwind is tricky. (Or, as the Clipper website describes it, it is "the most technically demanding point of sail".) Why? I'm not entirely sure. Part of it, I'm sure, is that you're flying the kite and dealing with all the related complications. There is also the fact that it's more difficult to gybe (come across the wind when the wind is behind you) than to tack (turn across it when it's coming from ahead). It might seem that turning straight into the wind is a bad thing, and it's true that you wouldn't want to head that way for long. But it also means that the headsails are being kept off the forestays by the wind. And the boom is nearly centered when you're heading upwind, so it doesn't have far to move in a tack. But when you gybe, the headsails get blown onto the forestays, and you have to be more careful about bringing them around to the other side of the boat. And the boom tends to start well out to the leeward side, so you have to bring it all the way back in, keeping it under control, then ease it back out. An even bigger issue is the accidental gybe. An accidental tack isn't great, but it's more embarrassing than anything. If you accidentally gybe, so you're coming across the wind without all that careful control of the headsails and the boom I mentioned earlier, things can really fly around violently.

The Clipper race is planned around a lot of downwind sailing. Why focus on "the most technically demanding point of sail" with amateur crews? I don't know. Maybe to test us. Maybe because it's fast. Whatever the reason, that's how we're doing it.

We have a new skipper

Never in the history of the Clipper race have all the skippers who started the race finished it. I suppose there's no reason to have thought that this year would be any different. At the same time, it was a huge surprise to hear that it was our skipper who would be withdrawing.

I don't really know anything more than is in the official announcement. Diane sent a note around to the crew, and while it's a bit more personal, there isn't really anything more to it. Maybe that's because there isn't anything more there. "Personal reasons", while vague, could easily be all there is to it. Leaving everything behind for a year is a huge commitment, and it could be as simple as after two months at sea with the prospect of nine more ahead, she decided it wasn't worth it.

On the positive side, I know our new skipper, Matt. He was an instructor on my Level 2 and Level 3 training weeks, and I thought he was excellent. He skippered a boat round-the-world two years ago. He knows his shit. He's a great teacher and a great leader. You never want to have disruption like this, but given that we have it, I couldn't imagine anything that would leave me more comfortable with the situation.

Race start

Went by race start today and saw off Telemed and the others. Big turnout down at St Katherine's Docks. It was pretty cool seeing all the ceremony, and it would have been nice to have been on the boat, going up and down the Thames and under Tower Bridge.

Soon enough. For now, I can just with them all good luck until I meet up with them in Albany.

Sailing tan

"Tiger tan"

Had a bit of a weird thought today while at the gym. While on my last two weeks of training, we got a lot of sun. Even with some sunscreen, I came back with a pretty serious tan. The sunglass tan was pretty stark, but the "tiger tan" on my feet from the open triangular gaps in my lightweight deck shoes is what really stood out. I'm sure that over the weeks of sailing around Australia, up through Indonesia, and to Da Nang, that tan will only get a lot darker.

But after that, things are going to get cold. Word is that once the fleet rounds Taiwan and turns north, the temperature drops quickly. We can expect freezing temperatures around Quingdao, and last race even saw snow. Then the month across the Pacific will continue to be really cold, dark, and stormy. I'll be heavily bundled up, and by the time I get to Seattle, that tan is going to be gone. I'll be as pasty white as if I'd spent the whole winter sitting behind a desk in London. Just dirtier.

Level 4 training

Level 4 training is where you finally get to sail on your boat, for your skipper, with your team. It was also the first chance for me to sail on a 70, since our Level 3 had been on 68s. My understanding was that we'd sail out on the Monday and just sail all week, maybe back and forth to France, only coming back in on Sunday (though it turned out I had this a bit wrong, both in theory and in practice). I'd been waiting for this for a while, and I was really ready to go.

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!

Level 3 training

Honestly, Level 3 got off to a disappointing start.

First, there was a full day ISAF course. It was dull, dull, dull. Yes, all the safety lessons are important, but almost everything we were told, we'd heard before. What kind of new information did we get? Well, I did learn that you get a flow rate of 500l of water per minute through a three-inch hole... but what does that change? I would have known that a three-inch hole -- hell, any hole -- was bad news. There was some talk of how to improvise a mast fix or a rudder, but that would really all depend on the specific of the circumstance, what broke, and what you had left. Maybe the point was really just to reassure us that all this was possible, so we won't panic if something were to happen? Long day, lots of stories, one graphic picture of a 'de-gloved' finger, but really not sure what I got out of it all.

Next disappointment was finding out we weren't going to be on the 70's. We'd all been waiting to get on those boats, the ones we'll actually be racing, to learn what they're like. The main new lesson was supposed to be the spinnaker, and we were still going to learn that on the 68’s. But there's also a lot to learn about how the 70's are laid out -- winches are in different places, lines run differently, the whole layout below is different. Plus, we just really wanted to get on the cool new boats. It certainly wasn’t the end of the world, but but it was disappointing.

On a more positive note, it was great to see Christian, Banno, and Sam from Level 2. I started to feel a bit of that sense of “community” with these familiar faces. Also, when we got to the boat, it turned out Matt was going to be one of the instructors again, and I was really looking forward to sailing with him again. The other instructor, Al, seemed good as well, more low-key, but he was feeling a bit under the weather.

Again, the crew was a really interesting mix of people. I finally met my first teammate from Telemed, Tony, a Canadian who had been born in Viet Nam and is doing the full round-the-world in honor of the boat people. Aside from being a really nice guy, he seems like he’ll be an excellent guy to have along when we get to Da Nang! Dan is a UFC commentator and ex-fighter who goes by “The Animal” professionally. He talked a bit about the challenge of moving from an individual sport to a team sport, but turned out to be a great teammate and just a really nice guy. Terrance is a property developer and an owner of a few Brasilian BBQ places in Yorkshire. Karim is a wind farm engineer who was, ironically, going to be on a boat sponsored by a coal mining company. One guy (I’m drawing a blank on his name just now) was from Aruba, adding to the small country list from my Level 2 training. His sister is an Olympic sailor. I tried to impress him with my Aruba knowledge by mentioning Andruw Jones, the baseball player… who turned out to be from Curacao. Rich is the official cameraman for the race. He’ll be along on one boat or another for the whole race. Overall, another nice bunch of people, if a bit less banter than we’d had on the last training week.

I will say that this week I met the first person who didn’t pull their weight. To this point, I’d occasionally had issues with people who were too ‘Type A’, they wouldn’t listen to other people, they’d jump to get involved in everything, often leaving whatever they were doing unattended. It didn’t happen a lot, but there would maybe be one-in-ten who got like that. This person, on the other hand, just didn’t get involved. On the last day, when everyone else was cleaning the boat, she had an excuse to leave. And I understand she’d done the same on other training weeks. I only mention it because it was unique. Literally every other person I’ve met on Clipper has been really good about doing their share and looking for more.

The first day was some pretty basic sailing, just reefs in and out, some tacking, some gybing. It wasn’t really slick, but it was the first time working together as a crew, and it takes a while to learn to work together. The second day was similar, but at the end we got a bit of a kick in the ass from Matt and Al, telling us that we weren’t as sharp as we should be for this stage in our training and we were a bit lackadaisical about things. Personally, I put some of that down to Al’s low energy. But at the same time, we really could have been pushing ourselves more.

And the following day, we did. Things picked up a lot. We eventually got the spinnaker up, which was very cool and meant we were finally learning new stuff. It’s a tricky sail, for a number of reasons, which I’ll get into in another post. It also needs to be wooled after use. Wooling is a process of rolling it up from the three corners, tying the rolled up bits with light wool thread, so you turn the triangle of the sail into a ‘Y’. Then, when you hoist it, the wind fills it and pops the wool thread. Anyway, wooling is pretty hard work, and it happens down below, where conditions are hot and stuffy. Not the most fun part of sailing, but everyone got stuck in. By the end, I felt like we were pretty good with the spinnaker, gybing smoothly, keeping it trimmed, wooling and bagging it when were were done. Still would have been nice to have done it on the 70’s though!

Another thing that occurred to me this week was that I hate cooking on these boats, despite the fact that I normally like to cook. But the galley is just not a good kitchen, and we don’t have good tools, and cooking for 15+ people at a time is never going to be good anyway. The stove is too small to get much going. Water takes forever to boil. The knives are dull. The sink is too small to get the big pots in. And you’re trying to do this all while everything is tilted 30 degrees and you’re bouncing around. We were supposed to be making some stir fry, but we ended up basically just stewing the beef and vegetables together then pouring some jar sauce over. I was thinking if we would accept slightly worse food, we could save an enormous amount of effort. We could do a few hot meals with freeze dried pouch food, like from back in my backpacking days and do a lot of meal bars. Maybe after four straight weeks of that, not to mention several months overall, I’d come to a different conclusion on the effort/quality tradeoff.

We were all staying around to do Level 4 immediately afterward. Tony, Terrance, and I got in a few beers at the local pub, where we also met a few other Telemed folks, then finished off with a curry. So much for getting in a good night’s sleep before Level 4! But still a good way to finish another good week of training.

Level 2 training

The summary version of Level 2 training is that it's about learning to live on a boat, as well as consolidating what we learned on Level 1. We got all that. We also got a really social boat and had a lot of fun.

Things were crowded for the week. They originally planned to run two boats, but they didn't quite have enough people, so instead they put us all together on one, fourteen in training plus four skippers. The boat couldn't even sleep everyone, but, as they explained, it wasn't like we'd all be able to sleep at the same time anyway!

It was an interesting group of people. Banno used to be a credit trader and just quit, with no apparent plan yet for what to do next except for this trip, more sailing, and time with his family.  Carla was a PhD aerospace engineer from Andorra. Marine was from Monaco and Karri fro Estonia, adding to the tiny country thing. Christian was a buy-to-let landlord, leading me to get briefly into work mode and try sell him on our offering. Sam had a business designing and manufacturing various gift items. Ian imports medical devices, ultimately leading to more sales mode, as I figured I had to put him in touch with Seth and Dan, two friends with a medical device startup. Patsy had the best story, about to start up an oil and gas consulting business with a friend after doing one leg of the race, she had done her first week of training and immediately decided to go round the world! She hadn’t yet told her business partner, and we were all looking forwrad hearing how that went when she did.

We also had four instructors. Matt and Simon had both skippered in previous races. They had both also come in last. I asked Matt at one point what he thought made the difference, how much was decisions he would have made differently in retrospect, how much was decisions that he’d still stand by but just didn’t work out, how much was the focus or quality of the crew, etc. He put a lot of it down to bad luck that then snowballed. For example, there were some injuries that were just bad luck, which left the crew short-handed, which things went more slowly and people were tired, which led to some more errors and required some conservative decisions like steering a course well around heavy weather.

The sailing was pretty straightforward, without a lot that was really new, but with a lot of focus on doing everything better. Matt was particularly good about this, getting us to think in advance through everything we had to do in e.g. a sail change, then agreeing what calls would be made at what point, and so what the next person would do when he heard that call. We went through this a lot and got better with the repetition. We were starting to feel like a racing team. Not a GREAT racing team or anything, but the beginnings were there.

We did my first night sailing, which was really cool. I was on the helm for a while, not exactly navigating by the stars, but steering toward a few particular stars on the horizon. The stars were amazing, not completely free from light pollution but still pretty isolated. The Milky Way was visible, and I could pick out a few constellations and planets… or at least guess at them in a semi-authoritative voice. Keeping a watch for other boats got more important and a bit more tricky, as you had to watch for and understand their lights. We worked a bit on sail trim as well. I fairly consistently managed to call for the wrong trim, which I’d like to blame on trying to read things in the dark, but really just came down to not having figured out yet what I was doing.

We had a few minor injuries as part of training. One person was a bit casual unloading a winch. The halard whipped off, she held on, and her had got pulled into a jammer. Just a bang and a small cut, but enough to get your attention. At another point, a Yankee sheet came free. Matt jumped to control it but got a minor clip in the head and was a bit dazed afterward. We headed back into the marina, so he could get checked out, and he was ruled OK in the end.

Heading back in, as we were on a long, bumpy sail back toward Gosport, some clouds rolled in and the temperature started to drop. I was a bit underdressed, so I went below to put on an extra layer. This took a long time, with the boat heeled over and bouncing around. By the time I got back on deck, I was feeling pretty queasy. For about an hour of uneventful sailing, I didn’t feel any worse, but I didn’t feel any better either. Then lunch came up from the galley, and after two bites of cheese and pickle wrap, lunch came up again. I dove for the low side of the boat, but I was clipped in, so I didn’t quite make it. Ugly. First time seasick (or any kind of motion-sick), in as long as I could remember and not great considering it wasn’t actually that rough, but I felt a lot better afterward. A few more people had trouble along the way, but they were generally more subtle about it than I was.

Our last night was Banno’s birthday, so we all went out to dinner and then to Gosport’s finest bar (which was not very fine). We managed a birthday toast with all the bubbly they had without, I think, having to break a twenty. There was some karaoke, including my go-to song. (If you don’t know my go-to song, we just need to go out to karaoke sometime!) There was dancing. Overall, a great social finish to a fun week of sailing.

Sea survival course

We had a full-day sea survival course before starting Level 2 training. It was in a local middle school, so we got the experience of sitting in uncomfortable and slightly-too-small chairs with all the walls covered by middle school geography material, at least for the first half of the day. There was a vast amount of material to cover, and I can't claim to have absorbed a lot of it. I'm not even sure we were expected to though. Well, yes, we were expected to come away with a lot of knowledge about how to handle ourselves if our boat should sink. But more than that, I think the idea was to build confidence than to really know every last detail. As long as individuals don't panic, and everyone knows the basic bits, then you can survive. At least that was my main takeaway.

Also, in my defence, the instructor was extremely Northern, and while I've spent a lot of time with a lot of Northern people, I just couldn't even understand about a third of what he said.

At one point early on, he asked how many people didn't know how to swim. I thought it was a joke until a few hands went up. His follow up, "Don't worry. It doesn't matter. If you go in, the sea doesn't care if you think you can swim. You're relying on the survival gear no matter what."

The second half of the day, we were in the pool, actually applying some of the techniques we had discussed. We got comfortable with the life jackets, including how they would automatically get you floating the right way up. We practiced the recommended backstroke technique for moving around, how to latch onto other people and two them around, and how to huddle together as a group to keep warm and keep track of each other. Then we deployed the raft, which was pretty cool, and practiced getting in (tougher that you'd think), helping others in, and securing the raft, all while having water thrown at us.

In the end, I was a lot more confident about the situation. But even with the extra confidence, it also rammed home the lesson that you just really don't want to have to abandon ship in the first place.

Well, I've finally pulled the trigger

So, that's it. I gave my notice today, so I'm now fully committed to doing Clipper. Still have to send in the contract, pay my money, finish my training, etc., etc.... But let's face it, I've quit my job and given up everything that goes with it, so I'm not turning back.

My boss was surprised, which I guess is good. But the fact that I wasn't just going to some competitor made it a much different conversation than it would have been otherwise. My favorite comment of his, "I don't know whether to say 'You bastard' or 'You lucky bastard'. Downside is that it looks like I'll be working out my six months notice instead of getting some nice gardening leave. He's also asked me to keep it quiet for a while, until he has time to line up a replacement. Going to be a bit weird. But then, I've been keeping this quiet as I've been thinking about it myself for the past few months, so I guess it's not really much difference.

This does mean I can really start telling people other than at work. Probably going to be toughest news around the rugby club. They'll be losing a Treasurer and a prop. (Not that my performance as Treasurer has been that great of late! Or my performance as prop! But there aren't any obvious people to step in to either role. Had to happen sometime though, and this is a good reason for it.)

Level 1 training

I think I'm doing this.

I just finished Level 1 training for the Clipper Race. This was a week of learning the basics of crewing a big racing yacht. I've done a little bit of sailing before, but nothing like this. This week was all about finding out whether sailing a big boat in bad weather had as much appeal as sailing a 35-footer in the sunny Mediterranean. And the answer is... not exactly. But it has something different, and something I could use just now.

There's much more of a team aspect to this kind of sailing than I expected. That's great when it works, but it also got frustrating at times. Each evening, we did a round robin, "What did you think of the day?" session. Night one and night two, it was all the same. "I really learned a lot. I had fun. I liked this. I liked that." But night three, it got around to me, and I broke form. "Honestly, I found today really frustrating. We're not functioning well as a team. Everyone is jumping to do everything, getting in each other's way, and leaving the last job with nobody doing it. It's like six-year-olds playing soccer, all swarming around the ball. There needs to be one person leading things. When Max (the skipper) is bossing us, we're fine. But when he just says 'go do it', it's chaos. Maybe my expectations are just going up faster than our ability, but it's driving me nuts."

Fortunately, people seemed to take it in the spirit it was intended. Not sure it made much difference, as fundamentally my expectations were going up faster than our ability. But as we got a few more days of experience working together, our communication got better, and I could see how a team could emerge out of all this.

There was a lot of technical learning as well. Winch handling was key, how to safely and effectively get lines onto winches, grind them on, and ease them off. Hoisting sails, changing them, packing them away. Tacking, gybing, taking in reefs and shaking them out. Rowing around the dinghy. Man-over-board drills every day, sometimes twice. And we were doing this in some weather. It was near freezing much of the time. At one point, as we headed out, it was 30 knots of wind and hailing.

And of course, the people. I really wondered what kind of person would be doing something like this. You'd think that the fact I was thinking about it would be some assurance, but it wasn't that simple in my head. But as it turned out, it was a really good group. A lot of people I could really click with. A few others who, honestly, didn't feel like as much potential for a connection, but I could definitely see working together with them.

A little thinking about the timing of the race, the World Cup, and my notice period, and I think legs 4, 5, and 6 would work for me. I'd come in thinking I wanted to do the whole thing or not bother, but this compromise feels right. It's still about six months. It's the Pacific. It's Australia. And while it would be much cooler to say "I sailed around the world" than "I sailed almost half way around the world", this just works better.