THANK YOU!
When it was first suggested in May of this year that I could be part of a racing crew sailing a 68ft yacht from the UK to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, via France, I had no idea of the scale of the adventure that I was about to embark on or the amount of hard work it would take to get there. To be part of the team I needed to raise £7,000 in 3 months to cover my training, food, gear and other expenses that made up the berth fee of a Clipper Ventures boat. I immediately started to search for sponsorship and was overwhelmed at the positive responses that my emails and letters provoked. This report is in part a ‘thank you’ letter to my greatest supporters: International Paints, The Rebecca Mcnie Foundation, Andy Smailes Web Design Co, Quest College, Balance Physiotherapy and ProV02 Fitness, as well as my friends and family. Without your help I would not have been able to participate in this race.
Joining the Team:
The training provided by Clipper Ventures for my race to Brazil began in June and took place over four intense weeks on the water throughout the summer. Apart from teaching the basics of sail trim and race tactics the crew were also instructed in safety procedures: how to react if someone fell overboard or how to make a mayday call using the VHF Radio. After my first week of training it was Crew Allocation Day, when all of the competitors found out which team they would be sailing with during the race. I became part of the Uniquely Singapore crew. Our boat, sponsored by Keppel Corporation with Singapore Tourism Board, sported a distinctive Merlion graphic on the hull that meant our boat was highly visible on the water. With Australian skipper, Jim Dobie, to guide us through the race the team pulled together quickly and in-depth plans were made to make living arrangements on board at sea as comfortable for the crew as possible. This included fitting nets into the bulkhead ceiling for extra storage, waterproof bean bags for the crew to sit on deck, and a waterproof daily ‘goodie bag’ of biscuits and crisps to keep us going for the entire trip!
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September 13th: The Race Starts
The start of the race crept up very quickly once my training had been completed. Last minute maintenance work was undertaken – including applying Micron Optima anti-foul to the entire fleet courtesy of International Paints, who were by now sponsoring the fleet through my involvement with the race – and then it was off to Hull for the start of the Clipper 09-10 Round the World Race.
In Hull the fleet was greeted by thousands of spectators and hordes of journalists and reporters waiting on the docks to wave us off. With a special fly-by display by the Red Arrows and the Mayor of Hull firing the canon the Clipper 09-10 race got underway. Many of the crews were astounded by the level of interest that people were taking in our team. A BBC helicopter hovered above the fleet and news teams from ITN and Sky trained their cameras on us as we made our way out of the Humber and in to the North Sea for our first sprint race down to La Rochelle in France.
Hull – La Rochelle in 4 days
The first two days at sea were key to Uniquely Singapore. Not all of us had sailed together in training before the race, so not only were we rediscovering our sea legs but we were getting to know each other and learning to work together as an effective team. When our outhaul snapped during the first night we had to put our heads together to come up with the solution to our problem. I went up on to the boom the following day and using a length of spectre rope rigged up a temporary outhaul so that we could at least sail at full speed again to try and make up some of the ground that we had lost in the night when it had first broken. With only three days left until our arrival in La Rochelle, and with the wind increasing, we decided to leave my temporary rigging in place until we got to port before attempting to make a bigger repair and to focus instead on consolidating our position.
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The North Sea treated us well, providing downwind kite conditions for much of the way down the Channel and then swinging to the South West as we reached the coast of France. With a fast broad reach in to the finish, we were accompanied by dolphins swimming in the phosphorous as we crossed the line at 0328am on the morning of September 17th in 7th place.
Renewed Determination: La Rochelle to Rio de Janeiro:
The crew started the second race on to Brazil with a renewed determination not to let gear failure hold us back a second time. Having identified several areas of our sailing skills that needed working on during our team talk in La Rochelle we felt confident that the next race would see us on the podium. Sadly this was not to be! After a light-wind start we experienced our first spinnaker wrap on the second night out of La Rochelle. This happens when the light airs causes the kite to collapse and instead of bearing away to fill it again the helm steered a course to windward, causing the kite to wrap itself tightly around the inner forestay – so tightly in fact that we had to sail off course for 3 hours whilst one of the crew went up the mast to painstakingly unwind the 18m kite by hand. Once we had it back down we found that there was a large tear from head to foot on both sides of the kite which needed fixing. Having worked for 2 years as a sail-maker I was able to help the team mend the tear but it took another 12 hours before we were able to get it back up and flying again by which time we had slipped from 5th to 8th place.
We put our kite woes behind us and focussed on speed as we headed down towards the ‘Canary Cage’, an area of notorious light winds around the Canary Islands. Our tactical decision was to head west, outside of the islands where we thought we would find more wind. Although by the time we got there the weather forecast was showing that the wind was dropping rapidly. We made our way through the area as quickly as possible and began seeing more wildlife as we headed further south on our westerly course. Dolphins and flying fish became a common sight, with one particularly adventurous flying fish flying down the hatchway in to the crew accommodation from where it was hastily rescued from and thrown back overboard!
The Doldrums – and Our Second Kite Wrap!
Once we had past the Cape Verde Islands we began to get in to the Doldrums territory. Jim began plotting the positions of the ITCZ (Inter Tropical Convergence Zone or Doldrums) as each new weather report came in. The ITCZ moves north and south depending on the pressure systems that are in the area and we wanted to avoid getting in to a system that began tracking south with us as that would mean we could get stuck in the Doldrums for many days. It was around this time that we got our second kite wrap. ‘No problem’, we thought, ‘this will be solved in a couple of hours’…3 days later we were still looking at the kite stuck around the forestay and wondering how to get it down! It was so tightly wrapped that no matter which way you untwisted it, it would re-twist itself further down the wire. Eventually Jim made the unusual call to remove the entire inner forestay from the mast. This was no small undertaking 2,000 miles from land and put our rigging in a compromised position as the mast was weakened whilst the inner forestay was removed. We waited for a light wind morning and then did the entire operation in one smooth, rehearsed action. Within 2 hours the kite was back on the deck and the wire was being refitted. To our surprise the spinnaker did not have a single tear in it and we were able to put it straight back up and to get going again.
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Sadly the three days attempting to get the kite down by more standard means had resulted in Uniquely Singapore sliding down in to 9th place but with the kite back in action we were determined to make up ground. Throughout this race, no matter how difficult things got we were very good at pinpointing the problem during our daily crew meetings and then trying to think of ways to work through them: whether that was teaching the less experienced crew how to helm with a kite up or reading the boat-speed numbers out loud so that we could see when we were slowing down, as a team we never gave up trying to work our way back up the fleet.
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The Home Straight
After the second kite wrap, and having fought our way through the Doldrums which seemed determined to drive us slowly mad and which lasted for 6 days, we popped out the other side back in to the Trade Winds. At last we were on the home straight! With the race course shortened so that the finish was now off the coast near Recife our final finishing position was 8th, as we managed to snatch back a position in the final days of racing, leaving Edinburgh Inspiring Capital and California more than 100 miles behind us. After 40 days and 40 nights at sea since leaving Hull the entire crew were ready to make landfall. Whilst we were disappointed at our final finishing position for leg 1 of this 10 month race, it was still a wonderful experience of life at sea and a lesson in how to overcome the inevitable problems that will occur when you are thousands of miles from land. In these situations we had only each other and our own problem solving abilities to rely on. It was a good reminder at times when we all craved some personal space that it was not worth arguing amongst ourselves as personality problems quickly affected the overall team performance. In my role as Watch Leader on this race I learnt about man-management and the importance of putting your strongest players in the key positions to allow them to help teach the less-experienced members of the team as quickly as possible.
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I would like to thank everyone who was involved in making my dream of competing in the Clipper 09-10 Round the World Yacht Race a reality, particularly The Rebecca Mcnie Foundation whose generous last minute funding boost meant the difference between competing and missing out. If you would like to continue following the progress of Uniquely Singapore you can do so at www.clipperroundtheworld.com I would like to extend my particular thanks to Andy Smailes also for his hard work on my own website: www.globalsail.org.uk
