BE careful of you ask for - Clipper Race Level 4 Training

As I wrote in my first English blog post, this is a translation of my Hebrew blog. It is not a google translation! I write it on my own (well, I must use google translation for specific word or phrase). English is not my mother tongue, so forgive me for my grammar and phrasing mistakes.

There are subjects that I do not translate to English and there are subjects that will be unique to the English version.

If you asked why there are no posts of the level 3 training. I can say that we had a very interesting training. We did an acquaintance with the actual race yacht, the Clipper 70 (a 70 fit yacht, more or less 22 meter long). We raise asymmetric spinnaker. However.. the weather was very calm with little wind so there was nothing much to tell.

Level four, that was a completely different story.

The way to level four: Crew Allocation Day

At May 20, me and some of the other Israelis participating at the race had a meetup in the house of Ziv Halevi, one of the participants. We gather in order to watch the live Crew Allocation event. This is the event where we, the crew, finds out about their team. I must say that the event was very tensed: one by one the skippers stood on stage, asked questions by the host. At the same time, each member of the skipper's team got an email message about their allocation.

My skipper was one of the last to be on the stage. Hannah is my skipper and Cameron is our AQP (Additional Qualified Person).

The was to level four: We have a sponsor!

We waited two month between the crew allocation day to the day where we got the message that we have a sponsor. In July, two weeks before the start of my level four training I found out that our sponsor is no other than Washington, DC (well, it is Events DC, the city's sporting and cultural event company.

As my level four training was the fourth and the last one before the beginning of the race, we did the training on a branded yacht!

A training that started in stormy
whether and ended crawling to the finish line of a training race

The fourth training is more realistic than the previous clipper training. The training is done on the actual yacht on which we will sail, lead by our skipper Hannah and her aqp Cameron (Cam for short) as well as the team's crew (in our case we hosted also four of team Qingdao crew as their yacht was full).

And more important, we spend all the training's time at sea.

However, before the training, we got our kit: long technical shirt, crew shorts, an official "Clipper Crew" jacket and of course, the Musto HPX Pro Ocean Smock and Trouser! After some fitting, I got a head shot for the team page and we settled on the yachts.

At the beginning of the training the participants told about themselves and on what they want to achieve in the training. Without hesitation I said that I want to experience a sailing in a stormy sea and to learn how to sail fast. I was not the only one to asked for that.

And indeed Poseidon grant our request: a stormy ocean at the first two day and an extreme tilt in order to achieve fast speed in head winds...

Immediately after the security brief and crew assessment we left Gosport Marina to return only after six days at friday (we did return for a ten minutes stop in order to offboard a wounded crew member).

At the first day, the sea was calm, which allow us to perform mandatory safety drills: man over board (well Bob overboard, a real size man dummy), we transferred Bob from our yacht to another yacht by dinghy and then they send it back to us and we dragged the other yacht and been dragged by her.

At the evening we anchored near the Isle of Wight. Olly and me prepared dinner in the comfort of the anchorage.

The next day was completely different...

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