ADVENTURE RACING AROUND THE WORLD

First Mate Rachel Burgess tells YM what it was like to race 28.000 miles around the world to win the Ocean Globe Race with her all-female crew aboard Maiden

- Rachel Burgess

I got the call while sitting in a little cafe in Horta in the Azores. Say ‘hell, yes’ first, think about the logistics second. So that’s how I became First Mate on board the iconic yacht Maiden with our record-breaking all-female crew, racing like it’s 1973. First I had to complete an Atlantic crossing. I then joined the team in Hamble in July 2023 for the final preparations ahead of the start. I also had to get my GMDSS GOC (general operator’s certificate) radio licence. Little did I know that the HF radio would become a huge feature of the days on board. It was often our only access to weather information but also our social network, with jokes or ‘quotes of the day’ with the other boats at the twice daily buddy chats – these became a highlight for the crew. After each one I would plot the other boats’ positions and work out the distances covered to see if we had made gains or losses in the last 12 hours.

Weather was always a hot topic. All information came from the slightly temperamental weatherfax and long-range HF radio forecasts – many stations have been shut down now and large areas of the South Atlantic have no broadcasts at all.

Part of the joy of the race was navigating as per the 1970s. Crack out the sextant and use the sun, moon and stars to cross an ocean. Suddenly the realisation of why you need an accurate course, speed, variation and deviation became apparent. Every 2-3 hours we would enter the log and create a Dead Reckoning (DR) position, then use either Bonnie or Clyde (the two sextants) to calculate how close we were to that guesstimate.

TACTICS AND NAVIGATION