“Guys we are gybing!”
The sentence, the punishment even, of this string of words, is something that everyone on-board has been dreading for some time. Day or night, this short phrase which is yelled with both force and conviction, coloured by a French accent, has had a very bad habit of coming out of Pascal’s mouth every two hours for the past 48 hours or so.
I’ll leave you a bit of time to digest the numbers on that but yes, we’ve racked up a shed load of gybes. So why inflict that on us? There must be a reason looking at our navigator biting his nails the whole time, his eyes riveted to his screen trying to decipher a type of multi-coloured chart, split in two by a little horizontal line.
This ridiculous line is the source of all our suffering, though, as it’s symbolises the ice gate; an exclusion zone put in place by the Race Committee to prevent us from sailing any further south at the risk of smacking into a block of ice. Why would you want to head south you’re going to ask me, down into the cold, grey depths? No, it’s not because we’re missing Brittany in December, but rather because to the south there is more breeze so you can go faster.
As a result, we are gybing every two hours to stay as close to the imaginary line as we can so we retain as much wind as possible and thus make landfall in the land of the kangaroos as quickly as possible and before Christmas I hope.
This long and tiresome gybing procedure leads to a multitude of tasks orchestrated by Charles and Pascal and then carried out by the whole crew. Seven sailors on deck busy themselves with preparing for the manoeuvre and shifting the unused sails from one side of the boat to the other, or stacking as we call it.
So what of the two remaining crewmen? Well they stay in the warm down below, but they’ve got plenty to keep them occupied too. The 10 bags of food, personal gear and other toolboxes don’t move around on their own like in the famous Mary Poppins film, that would be too much to hope for. There are various techniques for stacking the gear down below.
Initially, everything’s calm, ordered and nice and tidy; expert Tetris players our sailors. After a dozen or so manoeuvres of this style, you can sense the fatigue and the nerves setting in, especially if you’re fast asleep or downing a good Chicken Massala when the call comes up. That’s when the lightest bags develop wings and literally reach the other side of the boat without touching the ground. The initial game of Tetris is then transformed into a muddle of all kinds of bags, and you end up with a bag of food for day seven in the bilges with the bag of spare electronics.
This entire tortuous ‘pre-gybe’ stacking procedure can take up to a few dozen minutes according to the sea state and the wind conditions, but one thing for sure is that it’s never my idea of fun and it’s far from over. Right, I’ll leave you to it as I can see Pascal’s beginning to warm up in the adjacent office so I’ll start packing away my things just in case… “Guys we are gybing!”
...Have a nice evening
Martin
