Position 37d 48m N, 13d 10m W. By tonight we will have sailed 1000 miles, with 3700 remaining to Brazil. Last night was as different from the previous night as possible. Instead of ripping spinnakers, snapping mainsail sheets, booms crashing across the deck, and no sleep for anyone, it was a stable spinnaker run on good seas under utterly brilliant moonlight. I spent my fair share of the 3-7am watch at the helm. On a 68ft boat with an 80ft mast hoisting a spinnaker bigger than any house I've ever lived in, it was a challenging and even intimidating task, but it was also exhilarating. The boat plows through the water and occasionally surfs down the huge waves that are rolling the same direction we are sailing. Standing at the helm on a starlit night, leading this 46 ton mass of fiberglass and Dacron through wind and waves, it's amusing to remember being so intimidated by my 14ft catamaran years ago which, in respect to this boat, seems like a paper airplane compared to a 747. How good it is that we are able to grow.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Ripped Spinnaker
Position: 40d 21m N, 010d 28m W. Last night at sunset we passed the northwest corner of Spain and now are on a generally straight run (depending on the cooperation of the wind) to Brazil. The middle of the night found us with a ripped spinnaker and a few other breakages that, at the time, seemed intense and quite the handful in the dark but by the morning we'd repaired everything on deck and are sewing up the spinaker. It's truly a good crew i'm with.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Landfall in La Rochelle, France
Everyone should be so lucky as to have hugs like this waiting for you at the end of a journey, particulary one on the sea.
Yesterday we arrived at La Rochelle, France, the site of our first stop in this race. Sian, above, is a new friend who's boat we actually beat in our first race but who ended up docking just before ours. She was, therefore, amidst the crowd on the dock to greet me.
When one of the official photographers took a picture of our embrace and we both were so delighted with it, he graciously asked for our e-mail addresses and sent us both a copy.
I should note that at the moment of that embrace, neither Sian or I had the chance to shower for the previous four days but, at times like those, it doesn't really matter. Then again, had the weather been more conducive to fewer layers, perhaps it would have. When we land in Brazil, we will be wearing shorts and a t-shirt...or perhaps less. Perhaps there I won't receive as many hugs from friends on other boats as I did yesterday.
Tonight is the first chance I've had to find an internet cafe to post. Where to begin?
How about here: the official website for the race is http://www.clipperroundtheworld.com/.
Within it, you'll find this page dedicated to my boat, Uniquely Singapore.
At this point, all the video, photos, and blog entries on it are of my doing, though I'm hoping to get others involved in photos and blog entries. Officially I'm the videophotographer and our boat's sponsor, a new marina in Singapore, has paid the extra bucks to allow our boat to send back video by satellite from the sea. Any video you'll see this entire race is something I created. It's exhausting work editing video with a limited laptop in a cramped navigation station on a heeling boat while exhausted from the work of sailing amidst a continually interrupted sleep pattern, but I'm glad I've been selected to do it.
Our race down from Liverpool ranged from tacking duels in a river channel in the pouring rain (just out of Liverpool) to limping along at 1 kt in a near windless sea with La Rochelle still 120 miles away. As the forecast left no hope for wind and we all had schedules to meet, it was annouced in the middle of Wednesday that the race would end at midnight that night. One boat (happily it was Carrie's boat Qingdao) was one mile behind us at that point, limping along just like we were. Holding them off for seven hours didn't seem like much of a problem but in the end, they beat us by 176 yards after 500 miles of sailing. They got sixth place. We got seven.
That amounts to an extra half a point for them in a race that has 145 points up for grabs, but it will certainly be bittersweet if that half point comes back to haunt us.
Then again, it's all fun in a sense. Both Qingdao and Uniquely Singapore were full of happy words, hugs, and respect for each other when we docked side by side in La Rochelle last night, having motored the last 120 miles in.
It's midnight here and I've skipped dinner to write this. Hopefully I'll be able to post something from the sea during the four week voyage we have to Brazil beginning in 36 hours.
I'm off to bed.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Dolphins, Snowden, and Liverpool
Our fleet of 10 boats departed their (and now my former) home in Gosport on September 3rd and sailed up to Liverpool to position ourselves for the race start on Sunday, the 16th, eight days from now.
We arrived at Albert Dock in Liverpool this morning. I'm at an internet cafe with an annoyingly sticky keyboard but this be how I'll be updating this blog from here on out. My laptop is storage. I'll figure some way to include pictures in the future but for now it's just words.
The sail up had two notable moments for me. On the second night I had the 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. watch. When I shook my slumber off as I climbed the companion way steps, I was happy to note that the sea was bioluminescent that night, with each tumbling crest of any wave carrying a vaguely shimmering glow. The last time I'd witnessed this was in October '06 while sailing north from Spain back to England. That night I'd had the most incredible experience at sea in my short sailing career, something I've written about before: Midnight Dance of the Bioluminescent Dolphins.
An hour into the watch, while taking my turn at the helm, I glanced at the trickle of glowing light falling off our bow wake moving away from us on both sides and thought of that October night. As I did, a lone dolphin's body, shimmering in bioluminescence perhaps one meter below the surface, caught up with the focus of my gaze and then surfaced with a gasp and dropped back down into the water, trailing a torpedo-like wake of light.
"Dolphins!" I shouted and everyone spun on their seats to look. In only a few moments, ten more dolphins appeared and gave us all a replay of that show from last October. For everyone on board except myself, it was a new experience.
What was new for me, however, was that when I went below at 5:00 a.m. to sleep, I heard them through the hull next to my bunk. I feel asleep to the squeaks, clicks, and whistles of dolphins as one might do to the sounds of a forest or field at night on land.
The next morning we sailed up the coast of Wales, passing through an area of the Irish Sea that I had seen from the top of Mount Snowden in Wales on Christmas Day of 2005. Cyndi and I had chosen to leave London and spend the holiday weekend in a bed and breakfast in Wales. Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales at 1085 meters, was only a half day's walk and climb from our cottage so we built an appetite for our Christmas dinner by climbing it. It was exactly two weeks later that I stumbled upon the Clipper Ventures booth in the London Boat Show and was inspired to begin the decision process that has lead me, twenty months later, to begin this amazing adventure by sailing through the very body water I had gazed upon from that mountain top more than a year before.
Sailing by a few days ago, I'd set my handheld GPS to indicate the direction and distance of Mount Snowden's summit. It was covered in clouds as we passed the point nearest to it, but I still felt some sense of coming full circle in an unexpected way. Not to be deterred, with a sense of spiritual purposeI gazed into the appropriate section of clouds that my GPS indicated. Not much later the sun set and it grew dark.
The Andromeda Galaxy is high in the sky this time of year, making it as visible to the naked eye as possible. Clinging to the happiness and significance my Snowden moment, I pointed it out to all on my watch, explaining to them that they were looking at light two million years old. Such a concept never fails to awe me. My crew shared the sentiment.
Now we are in Liverpool, truly wedded to our boat and at home with all it entails. There's much work still to be done, of course. I have today off, but the next seven days will be busy.
I'll try to write again before we sail. If not, I should be able to post thoughts directly from the boat at sea. We have limited internet access by satellite.
We arrived at Albert Dock in Liverpool this morning. I'm at an internet cafe with an annoyingly sticky keyboard but this be how I'll be updating this blog from here on out. My laptop is storage. I'll figure some way to include pictures in the future but for now it's just words.
The sail up had two notable moments for me. On the second night I had the 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. watch. When I shook my slumber off as I climbed the companion way steps, I was happy to note that the sea was bioluminescent that night, with each tumbling crest of any wave carrying a vaguely shimmering glow. The last time I'd witnessed this was in October '06 while sailing north from Spain back to England. That night I'd had the most incredible experience at sea in my short sailing career, something I've written about before: Midnight Dance of the Bioluminescent Dolphins.
An hour into the watch, while taking my turn at the helm, I glanced at the trickle of glowing light falling off our bow wake moving away from us on both sides and thought of that October night. As I did, a lone dolphin's body, shimmering in bioluminescence perhaps one meter below the surface, caught up with the focus of my gaze and then surfaced with a gasp and dropped back down into the water, trailing a torpedo-like wake of light.
"Dolphins!" I shouted and everyone spun on their seats to look. In only a few moments, ten more dolphins appeared and gave us all a replay of that show from last October. For everyone on board except myself, it was a new experience.
What was new for me, however, was that when I went below at 5:00 a.m. to sleep, I heard them through the hull next to my bunk. I feel asleep to the squeaks, clicks, and whistles of dolphins as one might do to the sounds of a forest or field at night on land.
The next morning we sailed up the coast of Wales, passing through an area of the Irish Sea that I had seen from the top of Mount Snowden in Wales on Christmas Day of 2005. Cyndi and I had chosen to leave London and spend the holiday weekend in a bed and breakfast in Wales. Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales at 1085 meters, was only a half day's walk and climb from our cottage so we built an appetite for our Christmas dinner by climbing it. It was exactly two weeks later that I stumbled upon the Clipper Ventures booth in the London Boat Show and was inspired to begin the decision process that has lead me, twenty months later, to begin this amazing adventure by sailing through the very body water I had gazed upon from that mountain top more than a year before.
Sailing by a few days ago, I'd set my handheld GPS to indicate the direction and distance of Mount Snowden's summit. It was covered in clouds as we passed the point nearest to it, but I still felt some sense of coming full circle in an unexpected way. Not to be deterred, with a sense of spiritual purposeI gazed into the appropriate section of clouds that my GPS indicated. Not much later the sun set and it grew dark.
The Andromeda Galaxy is high in the sky this time of year, making it as visible to the naked eye as possible. Clinging to the happiness and significance my Snowden moment, I pointed it out to all on my watch, explaining to them that they were looking at light two million years old. Such a concept never fails to awe me. My crew shared the sentiment.
Now we are in Liverpool, truly wedded to our boat and at home with all it entails. There's much work still to be done, of course. I have today off, but the next seven days will be busy.
I'll try to write again before we sail. If not, I should be able to post thoughts directly from the boat at sea. We have limited internet access by satellite.
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