I found a couple of emails the other day that I had almost forgotten I still had. They were written in January 2003, somewhere in the middle of the South Atlantic, while my team and I were racing Madiba from Cape Town to Rio. Evert, one of the crew, kept a daily log and sent it home by satellite email, and I still have the messages.
Reading them 23 years later feels slightly surreal. Not because I had forgotten the race; I could never forget that. But because I had forgotten so many of the small things that made up the days. At the time we were measuring everything: position, distance, speed, wind, time. We knew exactly how far we had sailed and how far remained, because we were racing, after all. Evert’s log recorded the things that never appeared on a race result.
On day 11 he wrote that fatigue was setting in. Eight people were living in a very small space, with little change in scenery beyond the size and direction of the waves. A whale appeared. Flying fish kept bursting from the surface. At night, lying in your bunk, you could hear them smacking into the hull, like little children banging their hands on the side of the boat. One night I was at the wheel, the boat going really well, when out of nowhere one of them hit me full in the face. For a second I thought somebody had punched me. A white bird showed up hundreds of miles south of St Helena. That was our world.
Then came day 12. Thirty knots of wind, waves of four to five metres, a black night, full main and a large asymmetric spinnaker. Boat speeds hovered around 16 knots and sometimes touched 22 as we came down the waves. I had just climbed out of my bunk when I took the wheel, and the numbers kept climbing, 20, 23, 25, and then 31.1 knots, a new boat speed record. What I remember is the noise. The roar of the hull, water flying everywhere around us, it was absolutely crazy. Evert logged it, and added that you may be able to steer well, but you still need the right ingredients to make it happen.
Later that same day, flying downwind at around 17-18 knots, the boat wiped out completely. A full broach, and the spinnaker tore apart in seconds. In a moment like that you don’t have time to be frightened. You are on high alert, as sharp as you will ever be. All eight of us had to get on deck and get it down. Three spinnakers left. The log simply says: after all we’re in a race, this is down time. That sentence makes me smile now. When you are in the middle of something demanding, your definition of a problem changes. A torn spinnaker becomes down time, a few hours of sleep becomes a luxury, and you adapt.
Day 13 was a midnight watch with almost no visibility, no horizon, barely enough light to see the sails, sailing into what Evert described as a black hole. The whole crew was exhausted, and yet the next thing he wrote was: tomorrow is day 14, two weeks at sea, and we’re still friends, I guess that’s an achievement in itself. Eight people in a space that small, for two weeks, with no privacy and almost no sleep. It probably was.
Day 14 brought more storms, heat, and another close battle, this time with Baleka, one of the other 42 foot racing yachts in our class. We passed them, and then heard them calling us on the radio. Two boats fighting for the same result, thousands of miles from land, and it felt good just to have some company.
On day 15, a pigeon landed on the boat. Not near the boat, on the boat. It tried the end of the boom, decided that was too unstable, and then settled on Jan Willem’s head while he was trimming the spinnaker. Jan Willem was a heavy smoker who hadn’t had a cigarette in two weeks, and by far the sloppiest man on board. The pigeon didn’t seem to mind. It stayed there for ten minutes, then flew on. Evert finished that little story with a sentence I still love: we are sailing a race, but as long as we stay unaware of all the wonders of the world that are around us, we will never win.
I think that sentence has aged better than most of the race results. That pigeon had no idea we were racing. It did not care about our position, and it did not know we were trying to get to Rio in 20 days. It simply needed somewhere to land. For ten minutes, eight people who had spent two weeks measuring everything were given something that could not be measured at all.
Then came day 16. At five in the morning I woke because my name was being called from the cockpit. I got on deck in my underwear, a warm wind blowing, and somewhere in the distance we could see the lights of Ilha da Trindade, the island we had been looking out for over five days. Evert had plotted a waypoint 1.5 miles offshore, we rounded it safely, and then I went back to bed for another 30 minutes. That was it. The island we had been watching for so long was behind us, and Rio de Janeiro was still 650 miles away. The direct course is about 3,600 miles, but the South Atlantic high sat right across it, and by the time we got to Rio we had sailed close to 4,000.
In the end we were the first of the 42 footers to reach Rio and second on handicap, behind Baleka, the boat we had battled on day 14. I am proud of that, especially because it had not exactly been a clean race. Our start in Cape Town was terrible: we collided with a spectator boat that should never have been there. That is a story of its own. And our finish was not much better. When we crossed the line in the middle of the night, everyone was happy, the spinnaker came down, and we started the engine. Nobody was paying attention to the sheets, the ropes that control the spinnaker, and they ended up wrapped around the propeller. With the sails already down and a decent current running, one of us had to go over the side in the dark with a knife and cut the propeller free before we could motor into the harbour.
When it was finally all over, Jan Willem took out the one cigarette he had smuggled on board, sealed in a little glass tube to keep it dry. For three weeks he had been eyeing that tube. Can I have it now? Fine, I said, but on the stern, away from the sails. He reached for his lighter, and dropped the cigarette into the sea. Three weeks of looking forward to one moment, and it was gone in a second. Typical Jan Willem.
Reading the log now, I find myself thinking about how strange our idea of progress can be. When you are moving towards something, every mile seems important. You watch the numbers, you count the days, you imagine the moment when you finally arrive. Yet the things I remember most clearly are not the moments when the numbers moved. They are the moments when something interrupted them: the lights of an island appearing in the darkness, a single cigarette disappearing into the sea off Rio, eight people realising that simply remaining friends after two weeks at sea was an achievement in itself. None of that appeared in the results. And yet it is what I remember.
I still like winning, and I still look at the numbers. But Evert was right. If all you watch is the speedometer and the speed charts, you can sail four thousand miles and see nothing at all. The whale, a flying fish in the face, a pigeon landing on the head of the sloppiest man on board: they are there whether you are racing or not. They don’t wait for you to finish. So look around while you are getting there, and enjoy it. That is the part you will still remember twenty years from now.
