Amazing Sailing Stories by Dick Durham

Author:Dick Durham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119952626
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2011-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

A BITTER-SWEET TASTE OF THE RACING LIFE

Covered in vomit, soaked to the skin and plagued with salt-water sores, cruising man Dick Durham tells of his introduction to ocean racing during the 2001 Fastnet Race

Hell is not fire and brimstone, but cold water and a lump of limestone four miles off the south-west coast of Ireland – I know because I've been there.

Even before I had left the Solent I was soaked to the skin, cold, hungry and contorted into an upright foetal position on the edge of a heeling boat. Earlier, at the start, Cowes had looked like a settlement in south-east Iceland as low-lying cloud was blown over it by a rising south-westerly Force 6. Some 250 boats, from 80-foot Maxis to family-owned 32-footers tacked back and forth off the Royal Yacht Squadron their heeling masts just feet from locking horns.

Before the Needles at least three boats had retired with broken running rigging (28 boats retired in all) and I prayed the 30-knot dead noser moaning through the steel rod calipers of our Bashford Howison 41's shrouds would buckle the rig enabling us to join the casualties.

But Warpath smashed manfully on, throwing salt-water in drenching showers over me and the seven others of us on watch. If the cold showers were all mine at least the £10 notes being torn up were the sponsor's – £25 000 no less, the sum a contact lens manufacturers had paid to have their name on the sails and to leave five of their employees on board for the benefit of character construction, begging for overtime rather than leave the warmth of the office ever again. Quite how they inserted their daily disposable contact lenses without poking their eyes out remains a mystery still.

It had all started earlier in the day as I chucked my kitbag aboard this modern racing hull and shivered as I noticed its bolt-on keel, dinghy-like hull and spade rudder. Racing sailor John Hanson, 30, gave us a briefing in the cockpit of Warpath which even the high banks of the River Hamble could not shelter from strong draughts of south-westerly dipping her shallow hull over and back as he spoke.

Hanson cheerfully explained the symptoms of hypothermia and got me to sign a piece of paper in which I accepted that ‘ocean racing is a dangerous sport which can sometimes result in death or injury.’

As we came into the full force of the weather, unimpeded by the Isle of Wight, Ingo Boecker, a 34-year-old optician from Hamburg started whooping loudly like a kid at a fairground as Warpath rode through a series of switchback waves provided by the wind and the Shingles bank.

I am always made nervous by the naïve enthusiasm shown by novices confronted by rough weather: you just know Providence will want to teach them a lesson.

Suddenly and welcomingly I was hit by a warm wave. We must have crossed a shallow patch or an outfall, I mused, and licked my lips to remove the salt and

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