Who Sailor Turned Around After Winning Race and Sailed Around the World Again
There are grueling sports and then there'due south the Volvo Ocean Race.
The "Everest of sailing" is a triennial sporting outcome that sees seven teams battle it out on the globe'south oceans. For nine months, the 66 ft. racing vessels pursue a 45,000 nautical-mile marathon, stopping in 12 cities in five continents before crossing the finishing line at the Hague, on the west coast of holland, in June.
"Imagine that you're sitting there in your lilliputian boats in the middle of the body of water," Bouwe Bekking, the Dutch skipper of Team Brunel, recently told Time during a stopover in Hong Kong after a 5,600 nautical mile fourth leg from Melbourne, Australia. "In that location are huge waves, huge winds, and you're merely on a tiny nutshell in the centre of nowhere. You realize really how vulnerable you are."
Bekking, 54, is the most experienced sailor in the race'southward history. This year is his 8th try at winning. During an in-port race in Hong Kong'due south Victoria Harbor, his eight crew members demonstrated the agility of the yacht they call dwelling for most of a year. They haul at ropes and heave on grinders that winch the master sail up the thirty ft mast. The boat heels suddenly while the crew lets out a ballooning spinnaker to catch even more than air current every bit Team Brunel swerves to inside a few meters of a competitor. For a non-sailor, it's a hair-rising ride. For Team Brunel, it'southward nothing compared to the untrammeled fury of the open up ocean.
"It's a very moisture job. When we're sailing faster than 30-40 knots, at that place's water on the deck all the time," Bekking says. "Simply information technology's a special matter, especially because information technology's 24/7, and I think that's what makes it and then unique."
Information technology began as an risk. In 1973, British brewing company, Whitbread, and the British Royal Navy Sailing Association, teamed up to sponsor a global regatta. The Whitbread Round the World Race, equally it was and so called, followed a 27,000 nautical mile route one time plied by nineteenth century cargo ships.
"Information technology used to be an bounding main voyage," says Barry Pickthall, author of Sailing Legends: Volvo Ocean Race. "Now, it's an ocean dart."
Today, the race is a professional person machine, with millions of corporate dollars pumped into it. The class length has nearly doubled and teams sheet identical 12,500 kilogram carbon yachts. With on-board reporters documenting each day, fans tin can practically live stream the race through social media. The race has become a vanguard in the sport of sailing, with an "of import trickle down effect" for the advocacy of sail design and technology, says Pickthall. "It's the peak of the sport."
Simply for all its technological innovations, life on board is primitive. Each leg spans 20 to 25 days. To reduce weight, the crew subsists on freeze dried food. There's nowhere to shower or wash clothes. It'south cold, it's wet, and there'south no privacy. Sleep takes identify in narrow internet bunks hung beneath deck, where information technology's noisy. On a good night, crew members get two to four hours of slumber.
"Y'all merely get on with it," says Team Brunel helmsman Peter Burling, a New Zealand Olympic gold medalist and 2017 Earth Crewman of the Year. "That'south part of offshore racing."
When mother nature is referee, things tin can get horribly wrong. Take Annie Lush, a Team Brunel trimmer, who's previously competed in the Olympics and the Volvo Body of water race one time before. During Leg three from Cape Town to Melbourne, the team was battling relentless winds of up to 60 knots (about 69 mph). A massive moving ridge crashed downwards on the boat, slamming Lush several meters back against the deck. She broke three bones: two in her foot, one in her back — and the boat was non fifty-fifty halfway through the voyage. Lush was crippled for ten days on the roaring seas, thousands of miles away from a physician'southward aid, until the crew reached state on Christmas Eve.
"When you choose to do something similar the Volvo Ocean Race … it has dangers with it equally it would if you were going to climb Everest, or I suppose annihilation where you're somewhere where you won't be able to go rescued," says Lush.
"It might sound horrific, which it is sometimes," Lush says. "Only it'south as well amazing. I can't really say words that would justify some of the sunrises and sunsets you see. We run into some pretty beautiful things — whales feeding, dolphins — everything you can imagine."
They see some shocking things too. No thing how far from land these crews sail, from Chile'south southernmost Cape Horn to the fringes of Antarctica, issues such every bit pollution and plastics are inescapable.
Lush recounts seeing rubbish forth countless coastlines, trash caught on the boat'due south keel, and a seal playing with a plastic bag somewhere in the expanse of the Southern Ocean.
"We travel to some of the most remote places on the planet, and sadly we're seeing the reality that microplastics are existing, fifty-fifty in the Antarctic ocean," says Dee Caffari, legendary British sailor who was the start woman to canvas solo, nonstop around the world in both directions.
Her team, Plough the Tide on Plastic, is promoting the United nations' Make clean Seas campaign to rid the bounding main of marine plastic litter. The gunkhole is also doubling as a laboratory for ocean health. Volvo has equipped each vessel with instruments to collect information on sea pollution over the course of the race, but Turn the Tide on Plastic is testing specifically for microplastics — tiny plastic fragments that tin can ultimately contaminate the food concatenation. The ultimate goal is to build a map of microplastic concentrations around the world.
Every year, eight million metric tons of plastic end upwardly in the world'south seas. Coral reefs, sometimes called the rainforests of the bounding main, are being infected by billions of pieces of plastic. And according to some estimates, past 2050 the earth's oceans will be filled with more plastic mass than fish mass.
"This year we decided to take a step further integrating sustainability … especially tacking plastic pollution," says Anne-Cecil Turner, sustainability program leader of the race. "Empowering people to take action at every level, from the general public to the government."
Enquiry from Turn the Tide on Plastic plant microplastic particles in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, due west of South Africa, in Australian waters, and even near the far reaches of the Antarctic Ice Exclusion Zone.
Says Caffari, who's the simply female skipper in this year'south race: "This is my 6th fourth dimension effectually the world and I run into information technology deteriorating each fourth dimension I get around."
Since departing Hong Kong last week, the yachts are now on Leg 6, charging their way through the Coral Sea to Auckland, New Zealand. Afterwards a stopover in Auckland the crews volition take on the toughest and well-nigh of import leg — vii,600 nautical miles beyond the mighty Southern ocean, where they will contend with storms, huge waves, icebergs and the legendary Cape Horn — as they race to the Brazilian metropolis of Itajaí.
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/tough-enough-round-world-race-022729291.html
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