Haven’t had a proper night's sleep for at least a week.
I get up in the middle of the night and work on my computer, then crawl back into bed. The first leg of the Volvo Ocean Race starts on Saturday. It's 6,500 miles to Cape Town and I'm down to counting days instead of weeks and hours instead of days but as of Thursday I've finally made it to a normal prep mode. Jonathan McKee on Puma is doing the same things I'm doing today. This is good.
On my mind, on my mind. There are the obvious weather forecasting and navigation riddles, but this event is different from any other race I’ve ever done. I know that the reason I'm restless is more complicated than trying to figure out what this low pressure system or that high pressure system is going to do to the Med for the first 48 hours of sailing. This is the Volvo Ocean Race, after all. ‘Life at the Extreme’ is the promise. At times I'm overwhelmed, and it's all about emotion. I’m going to sail around the world.
Delta Lloyd tested after relaunching on Wednesday, Photo by Rick Tomlinson It’s meaningful that we start from Spain, considering the many explorers that embarked from Spain ‘back in the day.’ This leads directly to another emotion: Fear, utter fear, and I'm not afraid to tell you. As a navigator I know the world is not flat. I know we will not sail off a waterfall at the edge of the world. I know that we will not be attacked by scary green sea monsters rising from the abyss. However, I am scared of the beast, the boat itself. In our training we saw the power and unforgiving nature of the Volvo Open 70. These boats hit speeds of 30 to 40 knots. They break people.
Hopefully, tonight will be the night that I get a full night sleep, although in truth I'm too up to care if I do or don’t. Our Irish skipper, Ger O'Rourke, says, “We’ve got a bit on, but hopefully we can give the crew an early night tonight and a day off on Friday.”
We'll see.
This writing will soon morph into a blog at sailmagazine.com. I invite you to follow Team Delta Lloyd around the world. I'll try to share what life is like onboard, and I'll share the decision-making processes directly from the nav station. Because the Volvo Ocean Race has a system to prevent teams from gaining outside assistance, I can tell you anything without fear that it will be used against us.
Feel free to send blog requests and questions to blog@gregorysports.com. SAIL magazine will sift through for the best questions and forward them to me onboard. This race will be a first. For the first time ever, race fans can interview sailors in near-real time.
Here's the team.
Photo by David Branigan/Oceansport
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