December 12

Vendee Globe – Life in the Roaring Forties

Racing

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I have been catching up on the Vendee. My son of all people told me about Loick Peyron's dismasting. He is not a sailor (he loathes it) but he is learning French in High School and every day the prof shows them the French news including an update on the Vendee. I find this poetically ironic as he loves to berate me about what a bore I am about sailing. Between us, I think the drama of the Vendee's challenge may have captured his imagination but lets keep that amongs us. I read this report from Derek Hatfield on Algimouss-Spirit of Canada. It pretty much sums up what it's like day after day in the Roaring Forties and what it takes to participate:
"The Southern Ocean is a very humbling place for me. My emotions are raw and on edge due to lack of sleep, cold, isolation, loneliness and let’s face it, just plain fear of the unknown. It seems that tactically, for a while no matter what sail, daggerboard and keel configuration I tried, the boat didn’t want to respond to my setup. It’s very frustrating so I just returned to basic sailing skills to get through the tough conditions and before long, bingo, back ontrack. That’s what I have been doing for the past few days, it was driving me crazy as to why I was so slow. In a tired state, you start to second guess decisions you have made, which of course leads to more mistakes. So, back to basics. We entered this project to see how we could do against the best in the world but it became clear that we would not have the money it took to win as most of my time was spent marketing and promoting the event rather than physically and mentally training for it. When it came time to put the boat back on the race course after the start I had to look to other motivations to do the race. One very strong motivation, in fact the motivation that has kept us going from day 1 was to take the experience and share it with others."   Derek Hatfield (Algimouss-Spirit of Canada) in his daily message
Sail on Derek.
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