This is about my second week of Clipper Training and the amazing people that I have met along the way . . . .
On Sunday, 12 April, I met a whole new crew of people from around the world: Mark (IRE), Lizzie (UK), Jennifer (SCO), Nick (UK), Morgan (UK/WALES), Charlie (USA/Connecticut), Louise (UK), Antoine (FRA), and our first mate Paul (UK) and skipper Eero (South Africa/Finland). So many accents, so little time!
Once again, we made dinner, learned each other’s names, and headed off to the Clarence. I actually left early and went to bed at a reasonable hour! We were up at 0630 for a quick brekkie and then off to sail the English Channel.
Although the basic rules of racing with Clipper are the same, every skipper has their own way of running the boat, so I had to learn a whole new drill. Eero was great, a perfectionist - but in a good way. Somehow, he silently convinced you to want to do it his way and to do it right the first time and every time. We were now on the 68s, the actual boats that we will be doing the Race in. They seemed palatial compared to the 60s! You could do your task without feeling like you were on top of someone else. However, the parts were also bigger, which meant heavier.
We were one of the few boats that was up early and out of the marina to race and one of the last boats back in at night. We also did a night sail to become accustomed to what will be an every day experience - racing non-stop for weeks (up to 6) on end. Getting used to the missing toilet seat, the lack of showers, the mountain of wet sails to climb over to reach your bunk (and gear), constantly feeling wet and cold, and living life at a totally different and slightly bumpy angle! It doesn’t sound very fun, but let me tell you, it was the time of my life. We completed evolution after evolution and just when you thought you couldn’t do one more, there it was. We practised man over board drill every day. We also had the chance to go up the mast and out the spinnaker pole — except that with our group - it had to be timed. Everything we did turned into a fun competition.
Sleeping in such a small space makes everything echo - including the guy above you that snores like a rabid bear. However, I was so tired, I never needed my ear plugs. I just didn’t care. In fact, by the time I arrived home, it was too quiet and I missed that snoring above my head (somehow, it made me feel safe).
By mid week, my tendonitis had reared its ugly head. It had been dormant for years, but with all of this manual labour coupled with the fact that I sued up all of my ibuprofen the week before, I was nearly hurting. Lack of sleep and daily manual labor for 10 days straight ( I know, I have absolutely nothing to complain about), I was nearly to my knees. I couldn’t do one more evolution with the perfect that I thought Eero wanted. I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to cry. WHAT??? I never cry - but here I was, crumbling like a bad shortbread, falling like a tall tree. But, sweet and always effervescent Lizzie came to my rescue after she saw the look on my face in the snake pit: “Don’t worry lovey, I felt like that 5 minutes ago. You’ll be just fine.” That was exactly what I needed. No tears and back in action. After that, I never stopped working even harder. Even though Lizzie is now allocated to CV5 (with Eero), I will never forget her words and I use it when I start to feel tired, I hear her speaking to me (Thanks Liz!).
We sure had a great crew. Everyone had such different backgrounds and was so interesting. This time, however, we had a bigger group of “strong personalities”, so it took us all week to stop being polite to each other and start having evolution leaders. Totally different from Part A.
Because of our constant racing against no one but time efforts, we did very well at the end of the week during our race against a few other Clipper boats. It became very apparent that our skipper had a real depth of knowledge and was surely one of the ones to beat in the real race. He knows the rules inside and out but also has a real mind for long term tactics. Very impressive. To boot, he was a super nice guy.
At the end of the week after our races, we had the opportunity to meet some very important and impressive people. BBC was filming a commercial on another boat ( Elaine! was onboard) with Matthew Pinsent (UK Olympic Rower), Sir Robin Knox Johnston (Clipper Race founder, amazing sailor and person, and the first person to sail around the world, non-stop, alone), and Dee Caffari (Vendee finisher and inspirationally brilliant sailor). We then had to transfer and transport them back to the marina. It is always a nice way to end a hard day with a little visit from your personal heroes!
I can’t say enough about our crew. We had so much fun together, even if the weather was crap and even if we had no sleep. We laughed the entire time. Of course, there was plenty to laugh about with two Colonists on board. Poor Charlie and I had a real language barrier with all of this English-speak. But no matter what, we were always a team.
What I did realise by the end of the week was that we will be in some dangerous conditions that will require the ultimate trust of our crew to sail into safer waters. It is that trust and the emergence from the crap conditions that will make us into lifetime friends. You trust these people with your life and they trust you with theirs. You spend every waking hour with these people in a very small (hopefully) floating box. Your days are not filled with deadlines, returning calls, and filing seemingly important briefs - they are filled with the task of survival: eat, sleep, keep the boat going quickly in the proper direction - and most importantly, keep your crew safe. The stress may be the same at times, but it is more real and more important. And this is only the training bit - we have yet to get out into the ocean and see some real sh!t.
After my return to the office, someone said, what is it like returning to the real world. My delayed (and slightly wobbling) response was that I had just come from the real world. I wouldn’t change it for anything. I had finally found a place where I belong and people that were just as crazy as I am (it’s true, I am NOT the only one!). I thrived on the physical aspect of everyday racing, on hanging off the pulpit to hank on/off the headsail, grinding my life away on the coffee grinder, sleeping precariously in a floating cot, and meeting challenges that I had never faced before.
After 41 years, I have finally found my muse. The trick is to find a way to make someone pay me to do this . . . . . . .
From 5 to 12 April, I completed my first of several weeks of Clipper RTW Yacht Race training in the Solent and the English Channel. I will update this entry shortly . . . .While you wait for the update, check out the Serician’s video:
OK, finally updating the blog. . . I left SFO for Heathrow on 4 April with only one eye open. We had celebrated Bob’s birthday the night before and we had just learned that our beloved rescue springer, Maria(h) Farnsworth, was suffering from Canine Lymphoma. I took her for her first chemo treatment right before I left. I was guilt-ridden that I was leaving her for 3 weeks. Of course, she was in good hands, but what if something bad happened while I was gone? The good news is, nothing bad happened.
I arrived in Heathrow with an overpacked duffel bag (having no idea what conditions to pack for and having to pack for two climates as I was off to Kenya after 2 weeks of Race Training). I met fellow Californian Chris Wolf in London for breakfast and then we took the train to Gosport. I was anxious for the training to begin and truly had no idea what was ahead of me. Little did I know it, but my life was about to change.
We arrived in the early afternoon to meet the skippers of our floating “home” for the next week. They separated most of the people who know each other or potentially knew each other -meaning Chris and I were on separate boats.
This week, we would be on the Clipper Training Yachts, which are 60 feet long. They were purchased from the former Global Challenge Race and actually raced in several campaigns around the World before being honourably retired to the training fleet. From my 30-something foot racing boat experience, these boats seemed palatial! I threw my gear bag on one of the pipe berths that fellow Californian Charles Willson had so wisely recommended (he completed 2 weeks of training just a few weeks prior and gave a few of us the inside scoop upon his return).
Oh, the pipe berths. They were pretty standard issue. But if you have never seen one before, it might be a bit of a surprise to realise that you have to actually sleep in this camping cot device that is suspended by ropes and pulleys. Actually, they were rather comfortable, even if mine was on the second tier and required a bit of jumping and scrabbling to get inside. The good news is, the cabin sole was covered with layers of sails, so if the lee cloth failed and I fell out of bed, I didn’t have as far to fall. Actually reaching my berth from the salon was a bit like mountain climbing as the sails do not exactly store neatly and flatly.
We had little cubby holes to store our gear - which, by the second day were drippy and damp. Anything remotely cotton that was not super sealed in a dry bag absorbed the moisture and was forever wet — and if not remedied, smelly. Space was certainly limited, but for a one week sail, there was plenty of room for all of our gear.
As crew began to arrived, so did the fog - with a vengeance. The sunny and temperate afternoon turned into a gloomy, cold, and drippy evening. My long curly hair took on a life of it’s own and pretty much rebelled then entire 2 weeks I was in the UK. Despite the fact that we all spoke English, there certainly were times that I felt the skip or first mate were speaking Japanese. Several of the nautical terms were different than what I was used to using, adding to my confusion (it is a yankee not a jib, a safety line not a jack line, and a “booh-E” (buoy) is actually pronounced “boy”). Don’t even get me started on the names of food!
We put away the provisions that Adam, the first mate, had purchased, in what we thought was a logical fashion. The first two on mother watch cooked dinner. We spent time getting to know each other before walking over to the seemingly only local pub, the Clarence. We met crew from the other boats there as well. It was a strange mix of blue collar locals and excited Clipper maniacs.On Serica for this week were: Jodie (UK), Stacey (AUS), Orla (UK/IRE), Emma (UK), Hugh (UK), Mike (UK), Sam (UK), and Rachel (UK), with Adam (possibly the funniest guy in the UK) as our first mate and Ben (UK) as our trusting skipper. We became fast friends as we had to work as a team to accomplish anything on board.
Early Monday morning, we fired up Serica’s engine and headed out for our first sail on the English Channel and off to Cowes for the night, not to return to Gosport until the following weekend. It was a bit intimidating as although we had all presumably read the Clipper Training Manual, nothing really clicked until you actually had to do it a few times on the boat.
We hauled the sails around, completing headsail change after headsail change. The yankees had 20 huge brass hanks on them that were a bit hard to manage with cold hands. We found that wearing gloves was pretty useless and patiently waited for our hands to toughen up. The sails are heavy and made of Dacron, which at some point, rip off a finger nail or two. We also reefed the main, shook out the reefs, tacked, gybed, flaked and stored the sails, and made a lot of tea, over and over again. We did this every day, sailing from port to port and coming in in the evening to a new place just in time to cook dinner. Thankfully, most dinners did not have to be cooked at heel. Before we could have dinner, the boat had to be “put to bed”, which meant placing all of the halyards, sheets, lines, and sails in their proper places. The mooring lines were wet and cumbersome. Sometimes, I just wanted to go to bed! Of course, after dinner, was a bit of a chat about sail theory.
Later in the week, we completed a night sail, so that we could adjust to a watch system and sailing at night. Of course, the fog came in, it started to rain, and the wind was blowing like snot. Perfect time for a headsail change, don’t ya think? I worked the bow and had to grip the headstay with my legs whilst using my oven-mitt sized and cold hands to unhank the old yankee and hank on the new smaller yankee with the help of my 2 brilliant foredeck mates, Sam and Emma. There’s nothing quite like working the bow when it is bucking like a horse in the dead of night, with green water shooting up your oilskin trouser legs, and the wind is threatening to take your sails and anything else away with it. Thankfully, I had my new Musto HPX Ocean seaboots. Truly, the only dry part of my body for the entire two weeks were my feet.
I stupidly had not picked up a pair of loaner Clipper oilies as I had a new pair of sort of water repellent Henri Lloyd Blizzard salopettes and jacket. These were quite warm, but really designed to be a midlayer in colder conditions. I somehow thought that by having them and a set of oilskins would be cheating as it would afford me a dry set of outerwear, an option that no one else would have had. Needless to say, I was REALLY wet by the time we finally hit Weymouth at some ungodly hour the next morning and I never warmed up until I landed in Nairobi two weeks later. Despite all of that, I was having the time of my life.
We practised inflating and then rowing the dinghy about the harbor. We ALSO had the great opportunity to see Steve White and Toe in the Waterjust back from his successful Vendee Globe campaign, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston (brainchild of the Clipper Race, among a long list of accomplishments), Hannah Jenner, and Katie Miller!!!!
We also anchored in a beautiful bay near a wildlife refuge off the Isle of Wight. Before dinner, those who wanted to practised climbing the mast. Of course, I was all over that exercise. That night, we took turns in pairs on anchor watch, monitoring depth and position. Of course, during my watch, it began to rain and then the tide went way out (the tides in the UK are crazy!) and the depth meter went to zero. Of course, I failed to remember that it was in meters and not feet. As ordered, I woke the skipper up when it dropped below zero, but it took me awhile to realise why he was so calm (there was still a foot or two under the keel and the tide was due to flood).
On one of the few nights we went into a local pub for dinner and drinks and stayed out a bit late, the skipper promised that we could sleep in 2 extra hours to 0800. Unfortunately, he had other plans for us. A simulated fire alarm happened at 0400. I was the only one who sprang out of bed, but before realising it was the fire alarm, I had tried to close the hatches as I groggily thought that it was the bilge alarm and that rain was pouring in (mind you, it was NOT raining). Once awake, we make tea and began preparing the boat for a full day of more sailing - with sore heads.
On a second trip to Cowes, we practised climbing out to the end of the spinnaker pole. What fun! We had a man over board drill every single day. Clipper is really great at making safety an instinct and not just a theory.
It took a good four days before I realised that there was no toilet seat. The head was pretty much right in the middle of the berth area. There is a canvas door with a zipper that no one really bothered to use. Simply put, there is no privacy on one of these boats. It is just a fact of life and you acclimate. Just like cooking in a cramped galley with foreign food (squash is juice not a vegetable, flapjacks are not pancakes (Orla’s flapjacks are the best on the planet), bacon isn’t bacon it is more like ham, gammon is also ham, but different) and a cranky marine oven or making hot tea for eleven without spilling it or wearing it. There was no real shower on board, and we were not in a marina every night, so we grew accustomed to not showering every day - something that will be more intense during the race when you get a bucket of saltwater and a bar of soap once a week. I pretty much wore the same clothes all week, only changing when we ventured on land.
Every task on deck requires at least 3 people to complete. We had to work as a team or we would fail. In rougher conditions, there was no time to think about what you needed to do, you just had to do it. We took turns at every position so as to stay fresh and alert. Just like Ben said, by the end of the week, we would be a real team and we would sail the boat ourselves.
On Saturday, we returned to the Solent to meet up with another Clipper training yacht, Black Adder, for some evolution racing. Each race involved one of the evolutions we had learned over the week, such as completing headsail change - but for time. We ended up winning all but one of the evolutions, but winning wasn’t really the accomplishment, it was working together as a team. We did it, we really did it!
We returned to Gosport Saturday afternoon for a written exam. The hardest part about the exam was understanding the questions. But it pretty much covered what we had been learning all week long. We had to scrub down the boat and clean every corner and crevice- even under the floor boards! We took Ben and Adam out for a celebratory dinner and a few drinks at the Jolly Roger, which turned into a few more drinks at the Clarence and then a few more drinks . . . .
How did the week pass by so quickly? While we sweated, grinded, hauled, pulled, hanked, unhanked, and grunted all week long, we also laughed the entire time.
Eleven people from all parts of the world, in ages ranging from 18 to 62, with different kinds of jobs, with varying or no prior sailing experience, having to live together in what became a very small space. Annoying habits can seem enhanced when there is nowhere to be alone (well, there is always the rope locker), where your jobs on deck require you to be in someone else’s personal space and them in yours, and when you haven’t had a full night’s sleep in days. But, you also learn to accept people’s differences and quirks because it is far more important to be a cohesive group than to grouse about something that has nothing to do with completing your evolution. Every meal you eat might possibly be the best thing you have ever eaten as you are so physically and mentally exhausted and your body is in serious need of something warm and high in calories. What used to be important in our prior land-based lives, has been turned upside down and forgotten. A big house, a fancy race car, or a flat screen tele just doesn’t matter when you are at sea. All of a sudden, your every movement becomes important to the other lives on board (and also to your own), and you rely on yourself and others to complete the simple task of turning the boat in a different direction or making the boat easier to sail.
This week turned out to be more than just physical challenges (if you wanted to take them on, and I sure did) and mental challenges (so much to learn in so short a time), — there was a lot of introspection and self-imposed-barrier breaking. There was also the feeling of a very strong bond - I would sail with anyone of these people, anywhere. Thankfully for me, as I would find out at Crew Allocation 6 weeks later, three of them (Jodie, Emma, and Sam) are on my boat, California, for the race and several of them are racing multiple legs (Orla, Stacey, Hugh), so I will be able to see them in port at the stopovers.
Being the true glutton for punishment, I had to wake up Sunday morning (sore head again, I guess I’ll never learn . . . ) and move my gear to one of the 68-footers for a second week of intense manual labor, otherwise known as Part B Training.
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