Crew Blog

Home Truths

10 March 2008

Your mothers of the day were going to do a blog entitled “How To Tell If There’s A Moose In Your Galley” (answer: hoofprints in the porridge), but plaintive missives from home along the lines of, “how come you occasionally rocket up the positions but always sink inevitably back to eighth? Why can’t you rise meteorically and stay there like that nice Mr Gillespie? He’s got ever such nice teeth,” have made us do a bit of thinking and we’d like to share some ideas with you.

When Rob sat down with us to talk about aims and objectives (probably about three days before Liverpool race start), the overwhelming view was that people wanted to learn as much as possible and everyone should have as good an experience as possible. The result of this is that we do not always sail as hard as we possibly could: everyone gets a chance to helm whenever the conditions allow (we don’t throw a new joiner into the mix with a force eight in the pitch dark until at least their third day), which means that we don’t always helm as accurately or responsively as we could. I, for example, don’t reckon that I was a competent helm until Fremantle and I tried to avoid the helm because I didn’t like to think I was slowing the boat down, but my watch leader kept encouraging me to take the wheel until I could eventually point in a straight line most of the time.

Similarly, we believe it’s good to step onto the pontoon in each port as a cohesive crew, rather than as a bunch of broken husks who don’t want to see each other again until restart. This means that wherever possible we run evolutions with only the on-watch rather than getting people out of bed.

Where an evolution requires both watches, it tends to be delayed until watch change when everyone’s up anyway. The result of this is that evolutions can take longer resulting in loss of boat speed and we aren’t always super-responsive to wind shifts.

However, Nova Scotia are noticeably pretty much the only crew who spend most of their evenings together in port. This isn’t something we do intentionally to promote team spirit - we just like spending time together. Everyone leaves the boat having learned as much as they can cope with, whereas some boats reserve the helm for people who can do it already - something which clearly doesn’t leave much room for people to improve. These boats are higher than us in the rankings, but nowhere near as cheerful.

Given the option, would we change this? Would we be prepared to take some misery in order to snatch a couple of pennants? I’ve chatted about this with a few of the rounders and the answers come back mixed - some would like to knuckle down for a few races and get some points under our belt, but others are happy to pootle along as we are. One phrase I’ve heard is, “the beer will taste just as good no matter what our position”.

Our current performance is fairly consistent and will likely result in us finishing the race in Liverpool somewhere between sixth and ninth. Top half of the table won’t be possible without a complete change of team ethic. But we’re all happy and will come away from this as good friends having learned an awful lot. Is the balance right? Leave us a comment.

JC and Nina