Uphill All the Way

Sailing 30,000 Miles Around the World ‘the Wrong Way’, the Crews of the Bt Global Challenge Braved Icebergs, Snowstorms and Hurricane Force Winds.

- 

Most accounts of grim conditions in the Southern Ocean are written by skippers of race boats or owners of smaller yachts engaged in high adventure. Uphill all the Way by Alan Sears is different. When he signed on Toshiba with the BT Global Challenge for the 1996/7 race he was a music teacher who had been, amongst other things, a cycling champion, a violin maker and a groundsman. One thing he was not was a professional sailor. His take on events in the storm-lashed seas centres around his shipmates being beaten black and blue by the extreme motion of a big yacht racing upwind as hard as she can go. Those of us who have avoided this experience tend not to think about the hammering that bodies take as these powerful, unbreakable boats leap from wave crests into deep holes in the ocean. Here, we have it spelled out. From the start, Sears is suffering from a painful knee injury sustained in the previous chapter as he was washed off the wheel. We join Toshiba and her bold crew far south with ice threatening and Cape Town an impossibly long way ahead.

Deep in the Southern Ocean, the weather continued as before. On the wheel one day, it occurred to me that the wind had not dropped below 38 knots for the past hour. ‘So it is a gale,’ I thought, ‘and we no longer think anything of it.’ Ludicrously, we had reached the point where 40 knots seemed reasonably comfortable, just so long as we had approached it by coming down from 50! As night fell, this particular gale blew into a storm, with the wind running at a constant 45 knots, but with the sea relatively (and only relatively) flat for that amount of wind. This meant that