The experience that the crew had during the race from Portsmouth to Puerto Sherry, reminded me of the level 4 experience we had. Here is the translation of the Hebrew blog post.
Suddenly, the yacht balances and becomes more tranquil. The atmosphere lightens, and even the weather seems to conform. When you experience this sensation, you know the yacht is sailing in backwinds.
When sailing in backwinds, the boat glides effortlessly, and everything is calmer. The apparent wind (the wind you feel on your face) is slower, leading novice sailors to believe that the boat is moving slow. However, yachts like the Clipper 70 actually move faster in backwinds, especially with the gennaker up.
The Clipper Race is set up to take advantage of the trade winds, so sailors spend most of their time sailing in backwinds. However, in a round-the-world race, a "short sail in headwinds" can mean several consecutive days of sailing in headwinds, with the boat tilted at 45 degrees or more to the left or right, night and day. This is what the yachts experienced in the recent race from Portsmouth to Puerto Sherry.
This post is about my experience of sailing for more than 24 hours in strong headwinds, extreme tilt, and high seas.
Down below
In one of my level 2 blog posts, I wrote about the difficulties of sailing on a yacht when it is tilted. The Clipper 70s can achieve greater tilt angles than the Clipper 68s on which we trained in level 2. The photo below shows Izzy in an exercise that demonstrates the tilt. The area where she is doing the exercise is sometimes referred to as "the death corridor." Most of the space down below is characterized by long and narrow corridors running the length of the boat, but this zone, which you encounter when you go down from the cockpit, runs through the width of the yacht. If you are not careful, you will fall around five meters onto the drysuit cabinet.
Indeed, just at the beginning of the sail, one of the crew slipped in this location, luckily with just a nasty scratch on their hand. After this incident, I took extra caution when going down from the cockpit to the lower deck.
During level 2 training, we would sail quite horizontally at night. However, during the race, you don't slow down because people need to sleep. The yacht is sailing at maximum possible speed 24/7, and if you need to tilt, you tilt.
In this situation, each activity requires a lot of energy and mental strength. My main difficulty, being not very flexible, was putting on my boots. I tried putting them on on the high wind side and then on the down wind side, but I encountered different difficulties in each case. Once or twice, I even angrily threw my boot. However, I got better at doing it over time.
As usual, I got the top bunk. You can adjust the angle of the bunk, and I took my skipper Hanna's advice and adjusted the angle to about 20 degrees toward the wall (in my case, the starboard wall). I also set up the mattress partially on the wall. This way, when the yacht tilted starboard, I basically slept on the wall, while when the yacht tilted to port, I slept partially on the bunk and partially on a piece of cloth that was meant to prevent me from falling down (and it actually did).
Surprisingly, going up to or down from the bunk was easier than I thought it would be, mainly because the corridor between the bunks is very narrow. When we tilted to port, I "walked" on the opposite wall, and when we tilted to starboard, I climbed up using the lower bunk and just rolled myself into the bunk. Zipping the sleeping bag was a completely different thing, which required my best acrobatic abilities.
On the upper decks
I remember one time when I was called to the helm during high-tilt sailing. To get to the helm station, I had to climb out of the cockpit to the high side of the yacht and go all the way back to the station. When the yacht is horizontal, it takes me less than thirty seconds to reach the station. However, on high tilt, it took me about three minutes to go through the same short path.
First, I had to climb to the high side of the deck (which is like climbing a mountain), then carefully move all the way back, and then climb into the helm station. During this time, I had to keep myself clipped to the yacht, which requires me in some cases to clip on the short tether to a new safety point, then clip off the long tether and clip it back on the new point, and then clip off the shorter tether. I had to do this three times when moving to the helm station! Of course, before taking the helm, I had to take a minute to catch my breath.
Therefore, even on the upper decks, every action requires much more time and energy. Even tidying the ropes in the cockpit, which is an essential activity, is energy-consuming.
After sailing almost continuously from Monday to Wednesday, most of it in headwinds, we returned to the Isle of Wight on Wednesday to anchor and get some rest before the training race that was held on Thursday and Friday. Since the real race is already underway, I will not translate the last chapter of the level 4 series, but I will share my experience of the real race from Punta del Este, Uruguay to Cape Town, South Africa later.
On the upper decks
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