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.