Donate a Pint

It was a bizarre arrival in Santa Cruz; off the boat, still with my welcome rum in hand and straight into the brief for the next leg. With less than 36 hours in port and a whole heap of maintenance achieved, we were back out on the ocean. I really felt the buzz of being back in the race, back amongst the fleet and back on a start line. It was great; the jostling, the comraderie, the well wishes alongside the competitive streak. I had forgotten what it was like to race and we had new crew, a fresh motivation and a good atmosphere onboard.

We managed to get a good start given that our sail plan was very conservative and we were off. We had lost our main bowman 10 minutes before we slipped our lines but I was more than happy to try to work alongside one of the other experienced crew to ensure that it didn’t affect our performance. We worked hard, stayed focussed and I really thought that after all our trials and tribulations over the past few weeks, this could be our race and maybe even come in with that elusive 1^st place to give us a full set of pennants. After a couple of days, as we left the cold wind behind and left the foulies in the wet locker and exchanged them for board shorts and suntan lotion, we found ourselves sharing second place with the New York boat. For me the defining moment of the race came as we watched the sun set into a glorious array of golds, oranges and reds stretching across the sky. Just behind us Glasgow made a move away from our coastal route out into the ocean and shortly afterwards, New York followed them just a few hundred metres ahead of us. We looked at the charts, the weather information we had and took a gamble. Once again, we would be different and decided to race our own race and stay inshore.

Initially it was fine and the plan worked well but over a few days, the winds died and we had no way out. We were left travelling at less than 2 knots, relying on nothing other than the current to carry us towards the finish line, hundreds of miles away. We were desperate for wind, not only for the race but also to offer some respite from the overpowering sunshine. The further south we drifted, so more and more people slept on deck, taking in the amazing stars and the sliver of a new moon while abandoning the humid sweat pit that our bunk area had become. One of the great things about flat seas is that you can see for miles and anything that moves in the ocean grabs your attention. We spotted hundreds of dolphins many of which came to play in our bow wave, gannets diving headfirst amongst the fish that were making the surface bubble, a couple of whales, flying fish, squid, huge sail fish jumping right out of the water, hundreds of turtles bobbing with us on the surface, flying rays, and we even had a couple of young boobies (birds before anyone says anything!) taking refuge on deck for a few days.

We were hopeful for a while that the afternoon sea breeze might be enough to salvage something from the race but as we received the 6 hourly updates on the race position, so we slipped further and further behind everyone. Our only companions in our predicament was the Durban crew who were even further inshore and suffering even more agony. The irony was that once all the other 8 boats had crossed a shortened finish line, we actually found wind and sailed at good speed. This sailing game can be a cruel business! It had been great to be back in the race and sailing alongside the rest of the fleet but the result was pretty disappointing. However we consoled ourselves with a dip in the 2,000m deep paddling pool we were sailing across, whilst hoping that any resident sharks weren’t feeling too peckish. For safety and with an eye to towing each other to save fuel, we joined up with Durban and motored over 1,000 miles to Panama. It gave us the chance to share stories and we even had a few crew change boats for a night. It was a much needed respite from the same faces we’d been looking at for months, seemingly without a break! We did stop off in Costa Rica for a quick pit stop, some much needed coffee, ice cream and beer - what a treat!! It was great to finally arrive in Panama, just behind the rest of the fleet and eagerly anticipating passing through the canal, one of the greatest feats of human engineering.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 8:55 am 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.