The Scale of Heaven and Hell

I’ve devised a scale that describes the emotional spectrum of sailing in the Volvo Ocean Race. The scale is from 0 to 10 and is of increasing levels of “intensity”. It goes like this:

0. Sleep
1. Boredom
2. Zen-like
3. Enjoyable
4. Humorous and fun
5. Fantastical thrill
6. Competitive intensity
7. Frustration
8. Exhaustion
9. Fear
10. Sheer terror and survival

Ideally, cruising through this race in the middle ranges of 3-6, with plenty of 0 thrown in would be the perfect way to race around the world. This is pretty much how our leg has gone so far. However, right now I’m not experiencing these good numbers. Instead, I’m living in Zone 9: Fear. You see, there’s a storm brewing, a very big storm. If you lived along the coast in the southern states of the USA you’d be boarding up your windows and driving your car inland if you saw something this wicked coming your way. Us? We’re sailing towards it right now. You see, the low-pressure system to our south is going to merge with another low-pressure system to the southeast, unifying into a deep depression of 970mb. This system will generate gale-force winds. For us, this storm is a gateway to hell. My job over the next 5 days is to ensure that we don’t fall directly into it (just use it to our best-possible advantage), and that both boat and crew get to Cape Town in one piece.

Given the severity of the storm, we've been preparing for the blow for the past day. Here’s a look at our work list thus far: We’ve tidied up the boat with a bunch of small maintenance jobs. We have organized our stack of gear so that all emergency and repair equipment is ready to deploy if we need it. We’ve added carbon laminate to our damaged jumper spreader….oh, I hope that you haven’t forgotten about our damaged mast. We certainly haven’t! Ever since we completed the repair well over a week ago, we’ve been sailing on port tack. The damaged spreader is on the starboard side of the mast and we haven’t loaded or tested its strength yet. There is an impending gybe in our future that will coincide with a cold front crossing over us as the storm deepens to our south. Talk about trial by fire for our jury-rigged spreader!

Right now, we are in Zone 9. I need to make sure that I don’t put the boat in a location that escalates us to Zone 10. These boats are so powerful that they don’t need a breath of wind over 25 knots to set the ocean on fire. That said, our weather-routing software is much braver than I am! It will seek maximum wind speeds to get us to Cape Town as quickly as possible. To tame the weather-routing software for wind speeds over 25 knots, I told the program that our boatspeed would only be 5 knots. This is not the case in reality, of course, but it manually forces the router to hunt through the weather model forecast to generate routes that keep us in wind speeds under 25 knots. Over the next week, the hot seat (AKA my nav station) will be smoking as I try to balance survival, keeping the boat in one piece, and racing against our competitors. It’s a difficult equation to optimize…but challenges like this are what make being a navigator so invigorating.

But what’s really fascinating is the report from Expedition, our routing software, as I plot our track for arriving in Cape Town. According to Expedition, there are two paths that we can go by, a scary route, and a more sensible route (again, keeping in mind our damaged spreader situation). The surprising bit is that the ETA in Cape Town is the same for both routes, which actually helps simplify my life. At least for now…



This screen shot from Expedition, my routing program, shows the two of the many options that I’m considering for our track to Cape Town. This is a snap shot of the South Atlantic weather on Oct 29th at 900 GMT. The bull's eye in the lower middle section of the frame is the low-pressure storm. The red line represents the scary route, and the black line shows the sensible way to get to Cape Town…you might be surprised that the black route and the red route both arrive in Cape Town at almost the exact same time…. Try and guess which route we'll choose.

-Matt out