Whose Game Is It Anyway?: Football, Life, Love & Loss by Michael Calvin;

Author:Michael Calvin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mint Associates Ltd
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Lost at Sea

Friday 30 April 1993. 06.30 4°15S 15°05W

Words somehow seem irrelevant. It’s happened. This race has cost someone’s life. We’ve just had an extraordinary team briefing on deck to tell us Bill Vincent was lost overboard at 17.30 yesterday. The shock was immediate and profound. All those silent, private nightmares had come true. We knew the risks, but the timing of Bill’s loss is hardest to take. We’d done the Southern Ocean, taken our punishment. We’d survived what everyone thought would be the most hazardous part of the race.

Perhaps it is too easy to talk complacently of derring-do. Perhaps it is too easy to fail to appreciate the scale of something like this. Like Bill, none of us were wearing our life jackets at the time he went over the side. It had been a mellow kind of day. The light was beginning to fade. The wind was warm, the sea the richest blue. There’s so much to marvel at out here, despite the ocean’s capacity for malevolence. We’ve always said it can take us whenever it wants, and now it has.

I feel an awful sense of guilt, having exulted in the fact that Bill’s yacht, Heath Insured, lost a lot of miles to us last night. How were we to know that his crew were mounting a search for him? His loss hits us all, deeply. We identify with what has proved to be a fatal attraction. It has been our unifying force. All you could hear, during our minute’s silence on deck, was the soft slopping of waves against the hull. All you could feel was a gentle rocking movement. All you could see was people struggling with the darkest emotions. I wasn’t the only one to weep silently.

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