Race 14 : Oban to Portsmouth
Race reflections
The Clipper Race was more than a competition between 11 matched 70-foot ocean racing yachts. It was an adventure, a personal challenge, a sacrifice, and an investment in myself. I never saw myself as a sailor before starting the 4-week Clipper Race training program, although I had socially sailed with friends over the years, sailed in a tall ship in the Southern Ocean over a decade ago, and immediately pre-Clipper I had joined a local yacht club and crewed in weekend racing.
Over 45,000 nautical miles and nearly a year of my life later, I’d say I am an ocean racing sailor. I had signed up to the Clipper Race to see our world’s oceans via sustainable means: wind power. In crossing our world’s oceans, I also wanted to connect with local organisations and participate in sustainability activities in each port we visited. It was encouraging to see so many people living the ethos “think global, act local”.
Learning the ropes
In my gradual transformation to an ocean racing sailor, I learnt a lot about our ropes. From our training weeks when we learnt the basic knots we would regularly use to the names of the specific halyards and sheets that would become part of the everyday over time.I became so familiar with the ropes that I knew then by feel in the dark. The soft supple feel of the tack is distinctly different to the stiff solid feel of them in a halyard which resides in the same rope bag in the cockpit. A useful distinction in the middle of a dark night when you want to reef while a spinnaker is up! There were also the clever colouring of rope sets for their functions. For example, all lines for the Yankee were green, and those for the stay sail were blue. This made it easier for novices and those less familiar with the boat to work with the different sails. Similarly, all reefing lines were black, and had a clever light coloured fleck identifier system that made it easy to see them and identify which reef they were for in the dark. Reef one had a single light-coloured fleck line running through it, reef two had two fleck lines and reef three had three lines.Logical and a real benefit.
Over time I learned to maintain and repair ropes. This started back during race prep weeks in August 2023 when I worked with a few others to whip and run all of our beautiful new lines from Marlow, and strip old ropes to make sail ties from the outer casing and a range of functions for the Dyneema® inner core including splices, donuts and shackles. As the race progressed, the lines and sails started to face the trials and tribulations of the extreme environments we sailed in. This saw me learn to identify chafing on the lines, to milk on some protective anti-chafing sheaths, and whip the anti-chafe directly on the line.Some key lessons to protect our ropes included exercising our spinnaker halyards and tack, ensuring that lines weren’t twisted, and that any sharp points on the boat were covered. And good rope management practices such as keeping ropes tidily coiled and in the same order to reduce errors and save time. It is also worth noting the safety behaviour we used onboard of ‘pinkies first’ with our handling of ropes. Sails and sheets came under extreme pressure, and a hand or digit (and a winch!) was more likely to break than the ropes.In conclusion, at home I’ll take these lessons with me when I sail locally and will even apply them to the outdoor climbing I do recreationally.
#itsmarlowforme
