There is a note on top of the galley area from boatbuilders Green Marine, it reads: "The Volvo Ocean 65 is a racing yacht designed for the sole purpose of competing in ocean racing events."
There is a note on top of the galley area from boatbuilders Green Marine, it reads: “The Volvo Ocean 65 is a racing yacht designed for the sole purpose of competing in ocean racing events.”
If you’ve ever been on a VO65 I don’t think you’d consider doing anything else with it, other than competing in racing events. Pretty much everything is made out of carbon, the heel angle is very high, so you spend most of your time trying not to hurt yourself just by going from the media desk to the kitchen and back. On deck you’d expect to have something to hold onto, well… there are winch pedestals and ropes and you can always use these to go from the hatch to the helm and slalom through the sailors.
Even if you’d brought a fridge and plugged it in somewhere, or made a shower out of the carbon toilets, set up a table somehow, or installed a TV screen, to try to make a living habitat, you’d still realise that this boat was indeed made for ocean racing events and nothing else.
You’d empty the fridge within three days, the shower would break and you’d end up having to clean out the whole pump system, which is why we stopped using the toilet in the first place. A table is worthless for obvious reasons (heel angle), and any electrical thing on the boat would consume so much energy that you might as well be motoring half the time just to generate the power…anyway, all that to say it just wouldn’t work.
There’s another note next to the media desk: “You’re amazing, creative and talented! A TRUE story-teller.” The cool thing is that Sam Greenfield probably wrote that ages ago. I guess it was for himself and Yann Riou, our predecessors as On-Board Reporters on Dongfeng.
What I like about this note is that Sam probably didn’t realise at the time that the Dongfeng VO65 would be the first one back in the water after the refit and that she would then welcome many of the OBRs on their trials. They would eventually all sit at this desk for a couple of days to find out if they could do this job.
Honestly, when I first stepped on board, I had never been on a “yacht designed for ocean racing events.” I was already feeling tired from the seasickness pills that had been given to me, so my first reaction at the time was: “Shit, I’m none of that!”
