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.
