Sea Change - Ian Dickens

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two hundred yachts, motor boats, dinghies and gin palaces that had secured a waterborne vantage point to watch the start. With the Tiger Moths departing, helicopters took over the skies and the beach around Southsea Castle was awash with spectators.

      It all blurred into an amalgam of sights and sounds, with only a vague awareness of the number of spectator boats all around us, the twenty thousand people watching from the shore and the downward-pointing TV cameras from overhead, and thumping helicopter blades and radio calls and clock watching, as I gave the countdown to the crew. And then, in the midst of all the confusion, an echoing ‘BANG’.

      Off went the start cannon in a great blast of blue-black smoke, up went a huge cheer and suddenly all that had gone on before – not just the previous few hours, or the previous day, or the farewell party, the engine-servicing and first-aid courses, the maintenance period of the last month, the training races of the month before, but also the previous September, when I replied to Clipper’s ad and explained to the family why I thought it a good idea, and before that all the self-important politics from the work place – all of my past fell by the wayside and we were a racing yacht, off around the world, with every crew member playing his or her part to make it happen to the best of our abilities.

      No one heard the buzzing helicopters. No one waved, oblivious now to spectators. No one took in the armada around us and everything came to a culmination of expectation, focus and concentration that, gratifyingly, saw us cross the start line in first place.

      Except the whole thing was a bit of an anticlimax as there was still not a breath of wind and the pent-up energy and potential of our ocean-racing yacht remained, well, firmly pent up. All that training and preparation and readiness to show off our brave, heeled-over, ploughing-through-the-water-at-a-ridiculous-angle skills would have to wait for the secret, over-the-horizon land and in the meantime we could hear, uncomfortably, the peals of laughter coming from the shore as the spectators took in the ridiculousness of the moment.

      We lolloped over the line in first place, drifted a bit, created some apparent wind from the movement and managed to turn around the first mark. The tide stream heading out of the Solent gave us some more apparent breeze and we made it past HMS Glasgow at Gilkicker Point at a snail-like pace and then attempted to head over to Cowes for the next mark.

      It was here that the wind gave out completely and we watched, helpless, as the tide pushed us past the wrong side of a vital buoy which, if missed, would mean disqualification. We tried to combat the problem but the tide was stronger than our headway. In the end we were forced to throw out an anchor to stop drifting even further away and then wait an agonising five hours for the tide to turn, in order to drift back towards the start. And still not a breath of wind blew, so it was anchor time again in order to wait the outgoing tide once more, before we could slip past the correct side of the buoy.

      What a ridiculous moment. Here we were, at the beginning of a thirty-six-thousand-mile odyssey, anchored two hundred yards off the shore of Cowes, enduring snide comments from passing weekend sailors. ‘You haven’t got very far, have you?’ or ‘You’re going the wrong way – Portugal’s over there’ issued forth from a steady stream of smirking homeward-bound locals. How funny these jibes were, especially when we heard them for the twentieth time, and our sides almost split with mirth. Our patience, just three hours into the race, was being sorely tested. The dictionary suggests that ‘frustrating’ should be the word to use, but it was not nearly expressive enough to describe the moment.

      But even though we were at anchor, there were still problems to resolve. The generator decided to choose that moment to pack up and Stuart and I spent three fume-filled hours down in the darkness of the aft watertight compartment, attempting to coax it into life. All our efforts failed and, as it powered up the water maker, the boat went on to immediate water rations while we were still within a few hundred yards of a land-based tap.

      With the cynical yachtsmen firmly tucked up for the night and lost in a land of dreams that took them out to where the albatross flies, the merest hint of a breeze finally whispered its way around the sleeping houses of Cowes and crept out across the water to us. In the small hours of Monday morning we eventually got going, unseen by anyone and in the darkness of the night, we sniffed the first real breeze off the English Channel. A few hours later and the lights of England slipped lazily over the horizon as we entered an alternative world where time takes on an entirely new dimension.

      In a normal week the seven days have a structure and a personality. Monday is dreaded, Wednesday marks the halfway point, Friday means a big night out and the weekend is for football scores, dinner parties, lawnmowing and lie-ins. Ashore, radio alarm clocks were introducing Monday morning to the groaning masses, while out at sea, on board the racing fleet, the week took on a completely new structure, with its own unique agenda, rules and foibles that were not structured by diaries or timetables. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays still existed, but they did so in a parallel universe where time stood still.

      And if time had stood still, the front-runners had certainly not. Two boats had just managed to slip around the windless mark before marooning the rest of the fleet and because of the lack of wind and a heavy dose of bad luck, we were now fourteen hours behind the lead boat. And in our diary-free, timeless home, other problems started to test us as we tried to play catch-up.

      Over the next few days we sat in the confined space of the generator room, trying again to fix the duff engine, bleeding diesel, stripping electrics and bypassing solenoids, but all to no avail. Showers were definitely off, but at least we would all grow smelly together.

      We smelt a faulty propeller-shaft brake burning out its disc pads in choking plumes of blue smoke and had to revert to a much more seaman-like solution of strong rope and secure knots to solve the problem.

      We saw the bilge fill with sea water, pouring in somewhere around the engine exhaust system, that required constant bailing.

      The spinnaker halyard snapped with a loud bang, dumping the sail into the water and just as we finished that ‘all hands on deck’ drama, the team on watch played midnight fishing with a boathook to recapture the topping lift after a shackle sheared at the end of the boom.

      We watched as Stuart pummelled the computer screen when it failed to give him weather updates and we tried to restore the wind-reading instruments that suddenly decided to uncalibrate themselves on the cockpit display. Gary reached for the rewiring kit when the compass lights gave out for no apparent reason and Ali cursed the skipper of a large French trawler fleet who decided to motor across our bow at two in the morning, oblivious to our presence somewhere off Ushant Point.

      Ex-nurse Ellie marvelled at Anna’s swollen, bruised forehead and two black eyes, gained from being pitched into head-butting a forestay in the middle of the night, and we watched alarmed as Aki, Danny and then Andy were sent, cannon-fodder style, up the seventy-foot mast to fix the broken spinnaker halyard.

      Aki went first and at the top of the pendulum-swinging mast he was tossed around like a rag doll as he tried to sort out the lines. The impact of his body hitting the mast was so great, his sailing boots were shaken from his feet and plunged into the sea with a loud splash. Danny volunteered to replace him and was gingerly raised aloft. The poor chap also lost his grip and he too was swung out over the ocean, before returning, legs either side of the mast, in a bollock-smashing moment of agony.

      Then up went Andy, our testosterone kid, who loved the added thrill of danger. He too slipped, coming back down with blood pouring from a wound caused by impact with the upper mast spreaders that required a couple of stitches to staunch the flow. I watched and took notes, while Ellie conducted the operation. It looked a lot trickier than repairing ripe pears – especially as fruit tends not to howl out in agony when pierced with a sharp suture needle. Stuart joined in as another trainee doctor and administered a tetanus jab to Andy’s mooning backside. As the patient lay face down on the engine cover awaiting the shot, the rest of the crew clustered around and helped Stuart’s aim with a series of helpful observations. And at no point did anyone think it was anything other than completely normal.

      We decided that enough damage had been done for one night and agreed that the problem could wait until the hopefully calmer morning. The selection

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