Race 6 - Day 11
Crew Diary - Race 6 Day 11: Hobart to Whitsundays
16 January
This final act in the Australian drama is providing surprises to the end.
Last night we had a dazzling display of pyrotechnics with constant lightning flashes surrounding us, suddenly dazzling our sails and the faces of the crew as deep storm clouds thickened all around us. During the following watch the clouds released their deluge of refreshing water over the hot and sweaty bodies of the crew.
The night before we were just beginning to enjoy a favourable shift in the strengthening winds when a series of calamities hit us, one of which left us with broken battens in our mainsail, and damaged headboard and a section of track ripped from our mast. Anne-Lise has recounted her calamity in her blog.
I'd gone to bed fantasising about all the progress we might make during the intervening watches, only to find a trussed up mainsail on the deck and a course taking us marginally south. Four hours later we had repaired the sail, tacked and were heading positively at last, although as something of a wounded beast, unable to raise our mainsail beyond reef 3 and the gap in the mast track.
The winds, at long last, are favouring us and this morning we hoisted our heavyweight spinnaker with following waves. Such a great feeling to be heading fast in the right direction! Not only that, but we received the news that we had won the Ocean Sprint. Whayhey! Not such a bad crew after all!
With Flinders Island behind us, we are all beginning to calculate our arrival time in Airlie Beach; my optimism on the subject being constantly derided as delusional. There is no mistake the growing sense of demob happiness on the boat – or maybe it is just the happiness of having had a few hours with hatches open and some semblance of ventilation relieving us of the sweat on our bodies?
And to cap it all, we have just enjoyed the most incredible display by a large pod of dolphins, racing us, leaping into the air, sprinting to the bow, peeling away and rejoining, with breathing splashes, for a full half hour in perfect blue waters. Priceless.
For me, I calculate that I must have crossed the track of 'Switzerland' that I made during the 13-14 race coming out of Brisbane, which consolidates my sense of achievement in sailing all the longitudes of the world. A sense of achievement that will last my lifetime.
This, then, is my final blog. I hope you have enjoyed reading them. They have been fun to write!
Perhaps I could leave you with the final poem I wrote in 2014, as we sailed from Den Helder to London. I had the sudden sense that this immense experience would soon cease to be 'live' but would become fixed in the past as photos, blogs and diary entries. A painting in our minds. Having just been to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, seeing the great landscapes of Ruisdael, and with memories of one of the childrens' books I used to read my daughters, I suddenly sensed that we were 'sailing into a painting'. Maybe my crewmates will have the same feeling as they round Anglesea in July...
Seascape
They understood the sea, the Dutch masters:
The thickening clouds, the rain,
Wave crests and bulk,
The bend of mast and crack of tawny sail, The sun, breaking through heavy clouds, To turn distant sea bright green.
And here we are.
Holland faded behind us,
London ahead,
Sailing into a Ruisdael;
Pressed between timeless wind and wave,
Surprised under leaden skies,
Summoning a last resolve.
Crescent white sails ahead
Of the yacht we chase
Caught in the glare of the sun
On the bright green sea.