Race Start 31 July 2011

WOW! What a start to the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race! After many days of hard work, ‘Welcome to Yorkshire’ was ready to slip her moorings and head out for the start line. Not before we received a huge emotional goodbye from friends and family, and the populous of Southampton! Thousands of People lined the quayside and surrounding banks of Ocean Village to wave us off.

I was told on the morning of the race start that BBC national news had broadcast images of the boats getting ready and that they had filmed me up the mast with Leonie carrying out maintenance on our rig! We were now stars of telly!

As we left Ocean Village we made our way out into Southampton Water where we were escorted out into the Solent by HMS Illustrious, my Dad’s old ship! So for me this really was the icing on the cake! I scattered a few flowers in his memory and hoped he wouldn’t be too offended that his Lancastrian son was serving on a Yorkshire boat! I’m sure he’d be happy, as we are the only English entry!!

The Solent was churned white with the hundreds of small craft that had come to wave us off. It was the sort of thing you only see at the start of the Volvo Ocean Race (raced by the highly paid professionals) or a Royal Navy fleet review! As a crew we were so emotionally moved by the sheer volume of well-wishers who had braved the chop of the Solent to come and wave us off! The scale of what we were involved in really hit home. I would be home in a few weeks’ time (after leg one) but for others, this would be the last view of home for the next 11 months.

As we left the Solent and headed around the south of the Isle of Wight, the supports dropped back. The only company we had was from the media helicopters that were videoing or photographing the yachts from the air! We felt like ‘rock and roll’ stars!

Within the first 24 hours we had almost changed through every sail we had. The conditions were very light, which almost makes it a bit more challenging than the stronger conditions!

The first few days were very tiring, as many of us were getting used to the watch system. We have had a number of technical difficulties with the boat (mainly due to electrical problems). Nothing that has prevented us from racing, but with our‘water maker’ on the blink, it has made for some very anxious moments where we have had to plan and ration our water to last us until Madeira. I’m happy to report that we have now repaired the ‘water maker’ which is churning out 30 litres of fresh water an hour! Not enough to go crazy over, but at least we can go back to having ‘unlimited’ drinks!

We are currently on Day 4, and we have entered Biscay. This notorious stretch of water gave us a nice Force 5 Welcome, and chucked a good ‘rolling swell’ in for good measure! This triggered a number of crew to ‘start feeding the fish’…but I’m happy to report that so far I have felt okay. I was on Mother watch yesterday, which meant I spent all of yesterday climbing around the galley at 45 degrees attempting to prepare the meals for the crew! The positive side of ‘Mothering’ is you get a good long sleep afterwards and I have enjoyed a nice 9 hours in my bunk!

The only drawback is I feel that I’ve missed out on some of the fun that has been happening on deck. Yesterday we began to receive frequent visits from pods of Common Dolphin! I saw the first pod, but apparently they have been with us throughout the night!

I’m looking forward to going on watch in a few hours’ time and surfing ‘Welcome to Yorkshire’ down some waves, racing our very own pod of dolphins!