Donate a Pint

Opting for February was intended to give me some experience of the rough weather that I can expect during the race. I was not to be disappointed! With speeds ranging from Force 4 (windy) to Force 9 (why on earth am I doing this…please get me to shore safely) we had more than enough wind. So much so that we couldn’t even get the boat out of the harbour on some days.

However, despite lots of rusty knowledge buried deep in my memory we had two of the most patient teachers to help us dig it out. John and Karen were brilliant and finally I started to actually understand why things were done, why the order of pulling ropes is as it is and the concept of sailing round the world looked decidedly more appealing by the end of the week.

It was also a chance to get to know the actual boats that we’ll be sailing on. They’re 8 ft longer than those used in my last training week and it makes a huge difference as they seem to be a lot more spacious. All the ropes, winches and positions are different but to be honest, with my memory failure, that wasn’t an issue for me and it felt like learning it all from scratch anyway. Yet again I was at the bottom of the class but somehow the gap to the rest of the group didn’t seem quite as big as last time. There was hope.

I had one particularly rough day early in the week when yet again, it felt as though everything I’d eaten was being churned up deep inside my stomach and returning to the outside world with a force capable of disturbing ocean currents. It’s vile! I really hate that feeling. Thankfully, by the end of the week I was feeling much better and I was able to cope with the waves and swell of the English Channel although I’m still very nervous about the prospect of the larger ocean waves. I’ve found a new solution though… whenever I do any activity, I take my hat off so as not to overheat. It seemed to work but I’m sure we’ll find out on Part C training!

It’s amazing how life in the outdoors works. On that day, the waves and wind did eventually die down and as we motored back into port, the night sky lit up with the twinkling stars and the moon shimmering on the waves. After the turmoil of the day, battling high winds and sea sickness, peace and tranquillity returned and the beauty of my surroundings hit me. Had the struggle been worth it… is climbing a mountain in torrid conditions worth the pain for that extra special tasting pint in the warm pub at the end of the day…of course it is!

The end of the week finale was a race against another Part B crew. After a really good week of training, we were quite pumped up for the race and despite reasonable winds and a bit of rain, I was really looking forward to it. Sadly at the race start, one of our sails failed to launch but thankfully we were given a reprieve. We had been closing the gap but we had the not-so-minor problem of a container ship on our stern chasing us down. This thing was huge! I hadn’t realised just how big they are until I was looking up at it from sea level and it was giving us 5 blasts on its horn (which signals “what the **** are you doing?”)!! So, we had another start…only for the same thing to happen again. I was pretty disappointed to be honest and the opposition were soon well away and we lost the race. Now I’m not the best loser in the world but then that’s probably not too bad a quality if you’re entering a round the world yacht race!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.