I'm sitting on my flight to London trying to learn how to use this new mini keyboard...not easy even with my small frame. I suppose learning to type on a normal keyboard after 11 months will be the next challenge. Also, forewarning, writing the blog on my iPad isn't the same, so can't adjust the images or add text...so won't be quite as pretty.
I did the level 2 and 3 trainings back to back in May this year. This first week gave me a taste of what miserableness was yet to come and then the second week reminded me why I signed up for this!
Seasickness. Level 2 was cold and stormy, nearly everyone on the boat got sick...like REALLY sick! Vomit everywhere! I learned two things from this experience, 1) I did NOT get seasick easily and 2) I could handle the smell of vomit inside an enclosed small suffocating space! One of my unlucky crew mates, had her vomit bag thrown all over her during a tack, I can only imagine how horrible this would be...
Watch System. Level 2 is all about learning the watch system. Since we are constantly on the go, someone always has to be on deck to make sure we don't hit any whales...or maybe just other boats or land masses. (Sidenote, whales!!!) Our training crew was split up into starboard (right side, I remember this because there is an "r" in the word, however port also has an "r"? whatever works I suppose) and port (left side) teams, while one team was on watch the other team was free to do what they wanted, a.k.a. sleep. After years of limited sleep in busy season, this was easy! Getting up after barely three and half hours of sleep is never fun though. For training, we did four hours on and four off during the day. On the race, it depends on the boat, but generally is six on and six off during the day and then switches to four on, four off at night. This way one watch isn't missing sunrise or sunset everyday!
Cold nights. For those of you that know me, I am freezing cold most all the time. I had two space heaters at work, one for my feet and one to sit on my desk...shhhh. I am still not entirely sure why I think it is a good idea to place myself in a wet and cold environment for almost a year, but for some reason I am doing it anyway. My first night watch was the first time I was legit freezing cold and thinking what the hell am I doing! I just remember sitting in a puddle of water in the snake pit, bundled up in a ball, trying to stay awake, arms wrapped around my legs trying to stop the wind from hitting and thinking, "these foulies are definitely not waterproof!" After that experience, I was willing to shell out however much money was required to get some decent warm mid-layers! Luckily, one of my crew mates had ordered two pairs to try on and the ones she was going to send back were just my size, so at least I would be set for level 3 when we went back out!
Mother watch. Everyone gets a chance to be "mother" for the day. As a reminder, this means you are on food duty all day long with someone else. The reward for mother watch, or so I'm told, is you get a "shower" at the end of the day and you get a full night's rest without having to get up for the night watch. For one of my meals, I was tasked with making a traditional bangers and mash dish (sausage and mashed potatoes). Easy peasy, right? Nope. I was equipped with a very small pan to sort this task out. I had about 20 uncased links of sausage to cook. My first mistake, not realizing I had to brown the outsides of the sausage first before stirring them around. However, even if I had tried that, I would have only had room for about five links at a time....people get hangry! No time for that. So as you could probably imagine, my sausages slowly turned into cooked ground meat, add gravy and top on my mashed potatoes (REAL, not the boxed kind, that's living fancy on a boat!), looked like I served up the vomit everyone had expelled earlier....good news, still tasted awesome (or so I thought)!
Spinnakers a.k.a. big ass floppy sails. Spinnaker work is reserved for Level 3, but Skipper Ash was getting excited and thought, "Let's get that bad boy up!" I don't recall or perhaps was not on deck while the sail went up, but what I do remember was taking it down and wooling it! In a race this process is supposed to take 20 or definitely under 40 minutes? I think our time was somewhere north of 2 hours? As the spinnaker comes down, it has to be fed below deck so it doesn't blow over the boat. Once down below deck, the sail has to be untwisted and then rolled from the sides in making a bit of an "A" shape, then you tie wool around it all as you go along. The spinnaker is huge, so basically takes up the length of the entire 70' boat! Then the final bit is to get the sail back into the little itty bitty bag! If you thought putting a sleeping bag away was hard, this is a whole other realm!
Emergency Steering. As mentioned previously, there was a bit of a storm that came through on our level 2 training, I think it got up to a gail, which if I remember is at least a force 8 and above? (don't quote me, I'm still learning) Our team decided it would be best to sail out further past the storm and wait it out instead of heading back to shore with the other boats. Some where along the way, either on our way out or in, we had a bit of a scare. I had just finished up my heroine feet of helming through very choppy, "fruity" waters for about 15 minutes (let's just say, I need some more experience and muscle before I can confidentially helm for longer periods when the waves are throwing the boat in every direction) and Rupert had taken over. During my few minutes on the helm, I realized it was quite difficult to steer the boat in a straight line and required quite some effort fighting with the wheel. So it really wasn't surprising when our steering suddenly broke and the boat went wild, left to the whims of where the sea wanted to take us. I immediately go into panic mode and think I am going to die before I even start the race! However, our skippers swiftly took action, Skipper Huw who was sleeping below deck, was up in no time, half dressed, to assist Skipper Ash and the two of them had the emergency steering rigged in no time! This was certainly a lesson learned...1) I am going to freak the F out when something really bad happens, 2) our skippers know what they are doing, and 3) learned how to rig the emergency steering in a real situation!
Main Sail out of control!
The highlight of our little excursion was finding a way to make it to shore so we could get to the local pub! We were held up in a little town either north or south of the training site, where we were, I have absolutely no idea, but it was the cutest, quaintest little area off the water. There were dibs going on the little remote house on the shore with no access besides taking a boat to get there. I was not calling dibs, why would I want to be stuck there with no access to anything!
Cute house on the top right
Anyhow, we were docked up next to a floating pontoon in the middle of the water with no access to shore ourselves. The only way to shore was to get a water taxi, but they were not running since the water was too rough. After a couple hours of theory learning about "fruity" waters and not drowning in 100 foot waves, which slowly turned into playing hangman (where I managed to guess "Seattle" for every word...this was before the port had even been announced or named as our Team sponsor...I clearly have a sixth sense), we finally managed to convince the water taxi to come pick us up over the radio...success! We had a great meal and some drinks, then it was back to the boat for us.
All and all, level 2 was a great experience and a glimpse of the stormy seas to come! Oh and how fun it is to do the deep clean after some rough waters...amazing the places you find dried vomit! Ick!
Level 2 Crew: (L to R) Marta, Dave, Mia, Tiffers, Stephan, Sean, Lucie, me, Skipper Ash, and Rich
This one has Rupert added on the left, right of Dave.
And Nikki attending to the trimming who missed out on the group photo