Sailing Around the World – modern adventurers seek challenge on the seas

Novice Clipper crews face the might of the oceans

The Clipper Round the World yacht race is a strange and special 11-month event. At 40,000 miles, it’s the longest yacht race in the world and, crucially, the only Round the World race open to sailing novices.

In fact, half the people who sign up to the Clipper challenge have never sailed before.  This year the youngest competitor is 18, the oldest is 72.

The 2011-2012 race starts in one week, on the 31^st July, in Southampton.  The fleet only return to home waters the week before the London Olympics begin.

I’m one of the 500 who will be taking on the challenge, and I’m one of the sailing rookies – I’d never stepped foot on a yacht before my first training session. Half the crew will earn membership to the elite club of Round the World racing yachtsmen and women, a feat fewer people have achieved than have climbed Everest.  The rest of us will share just a portion of the odyssey, sailing one or more race legs.

Clipper sailors may set off wet behind the ears, but when we return our bodies and our abilities will bear testament to our achievement. Deep ocean racing sailors normally have years of experience before embarking on voyages of this magnitude.  We get four weeks.

Training

The pace that we’re trained at is the first challenge – a combination of theoretical knowledge, physical competence and memory, packed into long days of drills and hours on the water in the 68 foot racing yachts.

Half of us (including myself) have lost our breakfast to the gentle swell of the Solent.  We are slow, clumsy; we put our thumbs in the wrong places and struggle to manhandle ropes into messy half-remembered knots.  The reality is that we must improve – when your life depends on that knot, you must know it instinctively.  And as the glossy Crew recruitment brochure gleefully points out, no one has told the oceans that we’re amateurs.

My brain rumbles through helpful acronyms to make sure I ease the vang before I haul down on the topping lift, to make sure I remember what a broad reach is, to make sure I tie a bowline correctly.  For real sailors this is about as basic as remembering to pull your trousers down before sitting on the toilet.

But we are improving, the peril (real and imagined) bonds us tightly together, and we’re learning from each other.  It’s sobering to realise that my life is utterly in the hands of my equally-clueless teammates: You can’t sail these boats on your own.  They demand a crew of 18, working a 24-hour shift pattern, for however long it takes to reach the safe harbour.  The longest race leg, across the North Pacific, is 5,700 miles and 33 days of four-hours-on/four-hours-off. A gruelling test for even a professional sailor.

The Clipper race boats are identical, stripped-down and sturdy enough to take the battering that eleven months of ocean racing will inevitably throw at them.  But despite best preparations, plentiful training and modern technology, if the ocean throws a bender a tiny plastic yacht is a vulnerable target.

The race runs every other year, and in the 09-10 race one boat was wrecked on a reef near Indonesia, a skipper broke his leg, a crewman fell overboard (but was safely retrieved before the seas claimed him), and another boat suffered a ‘knock-down’ – when a freakishly large wave powers into the side of the boat with such force that it slaps it into the sea.  In this case, the boat turned 120degrees, the deck crew were plunged into the icy waters of the North Pacific and the mast was broken.  Everyone survived.

For most of us this doesn’t put us off – this is why we want to do it.  Racing a yacht around the world isn’t easy, and at many points, it won’t be pleasant.  But it’s not often that you get a chance to do something so immense, something that demands equal measures of courage and patience and stamina.

I want this sailing experience to push my mental and physical limits.  I want that very visceral realisation that we humans are small and not at all mighty.  I want the ocean to put us in our place but for my crew to ultimately triumph, like a cork popping back to the surface, ebullient and unscathed.

My teammates start in just a week. The Round the Worlders are preparing their 20kg allowance of personal effects that will last them more than three hundred days and 40,000 miles.  I must wait to join them for the crossing of the greatest ocean on the surface of the Earth – the Pacific.

www.clipperroundtheworld.com

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