Racing to Rio A perspective on Crossing the South Atlantic Ocean

I have crossed the South Atlantic under sail four times. Three times it was with full crew from Cape Town, South Africa, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the Cape to Rio Race. The other crossing was double-handed and going the other way. I will do it again in January but this time the build-up is proving to be very different.

First, I am not there to prepare the boat for the race myself. I have always been there to take charge of the preparations, with much able assistance from my crew and my family. This time I must rely on someone else to sort out any issues and to ready "Black Cat" for her 3,250 nautical mile voyage. That distance is nearly 3800 land miles and more than 50% longer than the famed Trans-Pac Race.

This voyage is small compared with a round-the-world voyage but it is, nevertheless, a major voyage and it is across waters that see very little traffic. Aside from commercial fishing ships and the boats that are racing, there are very few vessels crossing this ocean at any time. We have to be self-sufficient, to take care of whatever situation fate and the weather gods might send our way. We cant make a VHF call to the Coast Guard or US Towing to come fetch us. Each boat has to rely on its crew in an emergency and vice-versa; boat and crew are totally inter-dependent and both have to be fully prepared.  And, in the traditions of all seafarers, all boats are ready and willing to assist each other if needed.

I am very grateful for the work that is being done in Cape Town by Dave Immelman in preparing "Black Cat" in my absence. Dave will be my navigator for this race and was her skipper for the 1,800 mile Governors Cup Race from Simonstown to St Helena Island in December last year. He is the only one on the crew who lives in the Cape, so a big load has fallen on his shoulders ahead of this race. The Cat is now 18 years old and Dave has been charged with upgrading anything that needed upgrading, from structure through to finishes, rig, systems, equipment and sails. In many respects the St Helena Race served as a good shake-down to highlight any issues that have developed in the years since I handed her over to her current owner, Adrian Pearson.  I look forward to test-sailing her on Table Bay with all the new goodies that she has gained since I last sailed on her.

Racing under spinnaker into inky darkness.
Sean Collins & Adrian Pearson in the cockpit.

 The other difference is that for previous races I lived in Cape Town and  this time I live in USA. In Cape Town I was always surrounded by people from the sailing community. Cape Town is a beautiful place to sail, one of the best in the world. It can also be one of the toughest places in the world to sail, with sometimes violent weather and extremely testing seas. In that environment the fact that I was soon to cross an ocean on a small boat was of passing interesting but not considered to be too much out of the ordinary. After all, if you can sail in Cape Town you can sail anywhere, so what could be special about an ocean crossing?

This time it is very different. My neighbours know that I design boats for a living. They have not seen the big boats that I have built, only the little Paper Jet that took shape in their neighbourhood and drags around faithfully behind my minivan when I am going sailing. They have not seen the boisterous to wild conditions in which so much of the Cape Town racing happens. Here I am a bit of an oddity because I just dont fit into the mould. They are very supportive of what I am doing but dont really comprehend it; the who, where, what and how of sailing across an ocean. I must admit that I do enjoy explaining to them what I will be doing, where we will sail, the beauty of Cape Town and Rio, the good and bad experiences of sailing a small boat across thousands of miles of open water, through good weather and bad and the real or imagined dangers. In their view I fit in somewhere between eccentric and totally crazy, leaning mostly toward the crazy end of the scale. They worry mostly that it is a very dangerous thing to do.

The truth of a voyage is really somewhere between how it is viewed by my friends in Cape Town and those here in Virginia Beach. In each of the races that I have sailed we have had to cope with at least one big storm and another one or two smaller ones. Yes, it is dangerous; but we do what we can to reduce the danger. As far as I can recall, only one person has died during the Cape to Rio Race in the 42 year history of the event. Thousands have participated, two boats have sunk on the race, two have sunk on the return voyage and only one person has died. That was from a heart attack that would likely have happened on land anyway.

Gavin Muller repairing sails during the 1996 race.

We all take precautions because it is dangerous to be on a small boat way out of sight of land. The boats are all fully equipped with a wide range of safety equipment, which has to be maintained according to mandated schedules. All boats are scrutinied before being allowed to start. All boats have to prove a high level of experience and/or certification among the crew before they are accepted. That experience and certification is for ocean experience, navigational and seamanship skills and the ability to take care of medical emergencies with the very comprehensive medical kit that we carry with us.

Additional to those documented requirements, every skipper sets his/her own standards for behavior on their particular boat. I cant vouch for other skippers but on "Black Cat" we go into safety mode in bad weather and from dusk to dawn, when no person is allowed on deck without first putting on their safety harness and clipping onto one of the many secure points on deck before exiting the interior of the boat. Along with this, a clear head is always required, 24/7, so there is no drinking of alcohol except for one optional drink at happy hour each day. There will be plenty of time to imbibe in Brazil.

An ocean crossing like this does not need to be dreaded but neither is it a cakewalk. We need exciting activities in our lives to build the memories that we cherish. They help to remind us that we are alive and have a purpose in our lives, they give us the material with which to tell the stories that will entertain our friends and grandchildren in the autumn years to come. If we dont reach those autumn years we still come out ahead because we have had a lot of fun and excitement along the way.

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Some Thoughts on Capsize in the Atlantic

I am back home in Virginia Beach and working my way through the mountain of email, progressing toward normalising my work again. I have swapped the Southern Hemisphere for the Northern one, summer for winter and cruising the Brazilian Bay of Islands for a blizzard that is coming later today. What else is there to do than to dig right into the pile of work that awaited me?

A relaxed holiday on the sunny beaches, mountains and waters of Cape Town gave me time to absorb and reflect on the whole experience of turning a big boat upside down on the ocean.

Many people have said to me that it must have been a frightening experience but I didnt find it frightening at all. I remember thinking "Oh, we are upside down, was that a wave or have we lost the keel?". My next thoughts were about the safety of Sean, who was alone in the cockpit. I saw through the companionway that he was hanging on tight then my eyes and mind went back to what was happening inside the boat.

Sean says that he wasnt frightened either. The wave broke over the top of him and he was entranced by the mast spearing the water as "Black Cat" rolled over. He wondered if the mast would still be standing after she righted herself. He says "Rather a surreal experience more than frightening. BC ("Black Cat") felt safe somehow."

In contrast, Gavin had what might be considered a more normal reaction to what had happened. He got a big fright and his reaction was to move into the cockpit and stay there, where he felt safer (in the event of another capsize) and from where he was able to pump water from the bilge with the pump that is mounted in the cockpit seat. Gavin is the youngest member of the crew but has almost as many seas miles in tough conditions as the rest of us and can cope with anything that is thrown at him at sea.

I think that the big difference between Gavins reaction and that of Sean and myself is possibly due to our different experiences in waves. Gavin is not a surfer but both Sean and I are. We have spent countless hours in breaking waves that are sometimes big and frightening. As with all things in our lives, our minds get sensitised by our experiences and it takes progressively more intense experiences to break through that sensitising and make an impression. That sensitizing helps us to keep a clear train of thought in intense situations. This situation involved being thrown around by a big wave and was less out of the ordinary for us surfers than for the non-surfers in the crew.

It was also a lot more frightening for those on land than for us on the boat. We knew exactly what our situation was but loved ones on land could only speculate. They were hearing very sketchy reports from multiple sources. They knew that we had hassles and they knew that there was a very violent storm hammering us. Their minds were having a field day imagining all sorts of things happening to us on the ocean in wild conditions. Whether or not our actual experiences surpassed their imagined ones I dont know.

A few people have asked if I would rather not have been there or if I would have preferred it to have happened to someone else. Truthfully, a definite no. I am glad to have been there and to have experienced this. I am pleased that it happened to me and not to someone else. If I could exchange what happened for anything else, it would be that we did not break the rudder and were able to continue our Cape to Rio Race as planned. But that was not to be. We did break the rudder, we did get blown back into a very violent storm, we did get turned upside down by a big breaking wave and we did all survive with minimal damage to the boat or injury to the crew.

The result is that I went through that roller-coaster washing machine and I did it with my eyes open and my analytical brain switched on. I was able to observe for myself what happens in this situation, what happens to the boat itself and to everything that is inside this kaleidoscope tube as it turns through 3D space, jumbling up crew, stores and equipment and leaving them all relocated in whatever positions gravity and rotational forces happened to have thrown them.

I consider myself, crew and boat to be fortunate to have come through as lightly as we did. I also consider myself very fortunate to now be one of what must be a very small number of boat designers who have this experience in their backgrounds, an experience that is foreverafter there to influence how and why we do what we do in every future boat that we design.

I was told a few months ago by an interior design specialist that she wanted to work with me to design interiors for my boats. She said that on boat shows and in magazines she had seen some really bad interiors and the fact that she was talking to me on this subject seemed to infer that she thought that my interiors could do with improvement. I asked what ocean sailing experience she had, which proved to be none at all. I told her that my interiors were designed to be safe for a gyrating boat on the ocean, not for boat shows or drinking cocktails on a marina. My interiors and all other aspects of my designs come from my experience at sea, gained over many thousands of miles of cruising and racing in conditions from delightful to horrendous. From now on they will also be influenced by my experience of being tossed out of control inside a capsizing boat.

To see our range of boat designs, please go to http://dixdesign.com/.

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Search for Missing Yacht in North Atlantic

Last week a 12m yacht, the "Cheeki Rafiki",  sailing from Caribbean to UK, started taking on water in mid-Atlantic. They were obviously in a serious situation and contact with the yacht was lost early hours of Friday when about 600 miles off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. A search was started by the United States Coast Guard and the upturned hull of a sailboat was spotted by a tanker crew that reported it but did not investigate further. The search was called off by USCG on Sunday, about 48 hours after the search started.

The USCG press release said "We appreciate the assistance of the U.S. Air Force, Canadian and the three merchant vessels helping us to conduct a thorough search so far from shore," said Capt. Anthony Popiel, 1st Coast Guard District chief of response. "We are extremely disappointed that we were not able to locate the sailors during the course of this extensive search. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families during this difficult time."

There followed a huge outcry against calling off the search so soon and it has been resumed today. This was after many thousands of people signed petitions calling on the USCG to resume the search and many private yacht owners vowed to go out there in their own boats to search if the USCG would not do it.

I have some questions.

1)  Isnt it a primary function of the USCG to go out there and search for whoever is missing or in trouble? This is a department of US government, paid for by the people. Is it that strapped for cash that it cant search longer than 48 hours for four people who are in dire straits, when they have a pretty good idea of where they are?

2) We have watched with fascination how carefully the Southern Indian Ocean has been searched for a missing aircraft. I accept that searching for a missing yacht or liferaft with four people aboard cant be compared with a search for a plane with hundreds. But they know where this boat is, it was even seen from a ship. They are not guessing or relying on foggy evidence to locate a start point for the search. The boat is there and it is/was afloat. If the crew abandoned ship into the liferaft, as seems the most likely scenario, the raft is likely to be downwind or downcurrent, or a combination of the two, of the position of the abandoned yacht. Why would the USCG assume that the crew were in the water and unable to survive when they had a liferaft available for just such an emergency? People have survived for many months in liferafts, surviving tumultuous storms and everything else that nature has thrown at them before eventually being found.

3) Isnt it maritime law that seamen are required to assist each other when in distress? A report in Metro News says that "the overturned hull of the boat was spotted by a passing tanker shortly after they disappeared but it was not inspected as there was no sign of the crew". People have survived in capsized or even sunken boats for considerable time, about two weeks in the most recent case. Why would the captain of the ship not stop his vessel and investigate. He saw the capsized boat. Unless it was storm conditions he should have been able to launch a boat to cross to the yacht. Banging on the hull and listening for a response would have told them if anyone was alive inside. Seeing it, reporting it and moving on did nothing to assist the crew aside from recording a start point for the search. Is commercial profit so important to the ships owners that they would not do everything in their power to ascertain that there was nobody there to rescue?

Thanks for reading my rant.

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