November 10, 2004

JOG Racing

The lads have asked me to enter us for another JOG race next year. It has been a while since we all went sailing so this should be fun.

I think we will do the Cowes to Cherbourg race and back over a weekend. Let me relate a little story from the last one we did :)

We were on the return leg and it had been a long hard slog due to NO wind on the Sunday at race start. This saw the whole fleet just off the French coast making NO headway for over 5 hours (very tiring) Anyway we finally did get moving albeit with a very tired crew.

We were running our normal watch system leaving one novice with one of my experienced crew memebers whilst on watch. I had gone to bed for 4 hours along with the rest of the crew and had left Tristan and Nik on watch. Tristan was below doing some chart work leaving Nik on watch.

Tristan decided to check on Nik to see how he was and went above. He looked forward to see the whole side of a SUPERTANKER not more than 100 meters away and closing fast (we were making 9 knots) He quickly disengaged the autopilot and tunrned us off so we would miss the impending collision!

later when we asked Nik what he was doing he said and I quote

"I thought it was LAND! Although I couldnt figure out why I could see a TV"

he thought it was land and i guess that was ok! which is why he was still sitting there with his legs crossed not waking us up. We were heading straight for land at 9 knots and I guess that's just fine.

We worked it out that he was half asleep and tripping out on Red Bull (oh yes it gives you wings alright when you've had 8 cans) and had actually seen a tv through one of the tankers side portholes (yes we were that close)

can you beleive that!!!!!

Suffice it to say we tightened up the watch system after that :)

Mark...

Posted by Mark at 9:16 PM | Comments (0) | Sailing