I recently entered a competition run by Southampton City Council for am employee of a Southampton based company to win a place on a racing yacht. The Competition was for a place as a crew member on a challenge racing yacht to race across the Atlantic.
The challenge yachts are 72ft racing yacht designed for global circumnavigation and were originaly the BT global Challange yachts.
The race is in two Legs, from Southampton to Boston and back again. The place offered by the competition was for Leg 2, Marble Head, Boston back to Southampton.
Unfortunately I did not get the Winning place I did however get the first reserve place. As first reserve I would jump in and take the place of the crew member should they not be able to compete. This means that I got to do the training for the Transatlantic Race with the rest of the crew.
The training was on board the “Save the Children” yacht, an identical yacht to the ones doing the Transat.
The training was fairly extreme and as I had no previous sailing experience there was a steep learning curve.
We sailed all around the Solent and out into the channel, stopping over night in Weymouth. One of the most memorable parts of this section was coming past the needles. We had 40 knots of wind behind us and the seas were pretty rough. The deck seemed nearly vertical and I was sat at the tip of the bow getting soaked as we (and I) crashed through the waves.
After leaving Weymouth we circumnavigated the Isle of Wight, getting some night sailing in as well.
On the way back to Ocean Village the skipper let me climb to the top of the 100ft mast while we were heading up the Solent. The view from the top was amazing and the 72ft Yacht below me seemed a lot smaller. By the time I had got to the top we had run out of water so the skipper had to tack. This launched the mast to a totally different angle while I was still at the top, it was so much fun!
After having a “rest day” we were back on the boat for spinnaker training. The spinnikar sail on these boats is huge! There are two huge poles that the sail is secured to, these stick out perpendicular to the boat hanging over the sea. The best part of this training was that someone, guess who, got to climb out on a rope to the end of the pole, hang of the pole and spike the shackle to release the sail. This was a lot of fun and I got to do it every time the sail went up and down.
I managed to learn a lot about sailing in just a week. The crew were a great group of people and we all gelled really well. Although doing night shifts was draining on everybody (3 hours of sleep in 48 hours) the sailing was extreme and so much fun that I didn’t really notice.
There are some picture of the training my blog gallery.