Race 2 - Day 6
Crew Diary - Race 2 Day 6
21 September

Hello Ha Long Bay Supporters!

Some thoughts on helming: like contemporary art, lots of people seem to do it well but no one can explain their process to you. The wheel sits in a netted cage for your own protection (from flying fish, turbulent waves, the rest of your crew, etc.) and is surrounded by highly sophisticated instruments which transmit data about the current state of affairs with extremely high levels of accuracy... from a few minutes ago. The time delay associated with some of these instruments is sufficient enough that you could perfectly replicate any moment of sail from the recent past, but you have almost no idea what is actually happening right now. Maybe this too is for your own protection, but it does make helming tricky.

In addition to instruments whose 20/20 vision is permanently in hindsight, what also makes helming tricky is the interplay between what the wheel does, what the boat does and what the water does. Water you can't control, this is a given, but you would think that what the wheel does and what the boat does would be vaguely related. To compare this to driving, you have the steering wheel, the car and the road. The road might already be on the map, but you've still got a lot of latitude with respect to the direction of the car. And this is where the magic happens: you turn the steering wheel to the left and the car moves generally in the left direction, turn it back to the right and the car, as if by magic, moves right. Not so with the boat! Most of the time the boat seems to take no notice whatsoever of what the helm is doing, until of course it remembers itself and corrects, but even then it likes to save itself up for when you no longer need to go in that direction. The boat also has no sense of proportionate retaliation, you can turn and turn and turn and turn and not see one degree of change in the compass course, but then when your arms are tired and your back is sore and your eyes are weak from staring fixedly at a point you're convinced you'll never reach, the slightest pressure from you weaker hand sends the boat veering off in the direction you stopped turning in five minutes ago. And that's when the boat is being good to you, and not moving determinedly in your opposite direction!

So you start seeing things, call them mirages of your future, where you give up on helming altogether and just let the boat take you wherever it's determined to go. If the tides have any mercy you'll eventually end up ashore somewhere and you'll call it a race finish so you can give yourself credit for something. Maybe wherever you end up will have high speed internet and you can work remotely, because if the only way out is by sea well then this is where you live now. And just when you start composing ballads in your head about a young sailor who used to know where she was going, or used to be going somewhere she knew, the timer dings, your 20 minutes are up, and a new victim approaches the helm.

Meta Hanlon