There are other, better accounts of the Bermuda 1-2 race, that were written by real sailors who know what they’re doing. But here you are reading mine.

For the fourth consecutive time, I was the crew of Nimros on the race’s double-handed return leg. (There was an earlier trip with the rest of my family when I was six years old, but I was much better at being sick back then than being a crew. I’m not sure how much has changed.)

I arrived in Bermuda four days before the start.

June 19 Photos

Monday, June 16, 2003

Bermuda Day 1

Busy day. Woke up at 4 AM in Providence, had breakfast in Boston, and was in Bermuda by noon. The flight itself was only an hour and a half long, and the customs line at the end of it was an hour and twenty minutes long. Surviving that, I had a good time snorkeling for a few hours and following some huge parrotfish around. At night, a group of us went to Ferry Reach to watch Bermuda fireworms copulate.

Finishing It Off with Copulation

On the third day after the full moon, during summer months when the water is just the right temperature, 55 minutes after sunset (you can set your watch by it, said our guide), female fireworms start to glow in the water, and within seconds you can see glowing males rocket up from underneath and explode in a greenish display. The remains fertilize the female’s eggs.

We were told that the male really does explode and die in the process. (Which leads us to question why. What a waste! Some other male species at least have the courtesy to allow the females to eat them. Maybe the males just explode out of spite.)

I did some digging online later, and some of the web sites mentioning the Bermuda glowworm (Odontosyllis enopla, if that’s important to you) agree that the male does die, and then they go on to recommend you take their boat tours to watch. Several less touristy web sites about marine life don’t mention anything noteworthy happening apart from the release of sperm and eggs. Another site, reviewing the book Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition, includes the book’s assertion that they both die. So much for consistent information. Probably the most reputable, or at least dry, account is an abstract of a paper in Invertebrate Biology, which grabs our attention with details on the worms’ “hitherto unknown benthic life-style” and goes on to say that “after swarming, the worms shed the swimming setae.... Bioluminescence is not restricted to the well-described swarming display but was observed for months after spawning as a startle response,” implying that the worms do live after spawning. But the abstract also notes that the researchers originally caught the glowworms before they could finish copulation and then kept them in captivity, so maybe the paper doesn’t mean anything at all. In conclusion, I can’t conclude anything. I have no idea what I saw.

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Bermuda Day 2

The weather maps show a low sitting right over Bermuda, which brings rain, and plenty of it. Most of the things to do in Bermuda involve being outdoors. So I read the first book I pick up, which turns out to be a how-to guide for troubleshooting marine diesel engines.

To get to Nimros from the dock, we walk down a plank and cut across the stern of our neighbor, Aggressive, whose owner Ray Renaud and his daughter BJ had either watched the glowworms die violently, or watched them not die at all, with us the night before.

Ray is known for always having a huge variety of tools and equipment on hand and immediately accessible, yet the interior his boat looks almost empty. My father suspects that in addition his regular boat, he has a hidden boat somewhere where he keeps everything.

The report on sailinganarchy.com describes Ray’s impressive last-minute propeller repair just before start of the first leg:

When the boats moved off the dock for leg one on June 7, Ray Renaud on Aggressive could not seem to get his C+C to go into reverse. A quick dive into the 52 degree water revealed the problem, the fact that the 2 blades of his feathering prop decided to drop to the bottom of Newport Harbor. End of Ray's race? Nah. He grabs a hammer, his spare (!) 2 bladed prop, a nut and cotter pin and dives the shaft. Bang of the old hub, slide on the spare prop, spin on the nut and pop in the cotter pin. And while he had to sail out of the harbor to the starting line since his class ten minute warning had started, it did not seem to affect his overall results since he took a bullet in his class for the first leg.

At the awards ceremony for the first leg, my father gets the Onion award for coming in last. Which makes the second time in a row. Strangely enough, on the race before that, in 1999, he had won his class. I guess he’s not one to hold the middle ground. Looking on the bright side, he notes that the Onion award, being made of food and drink, is the one that’s most useful when stuck out at sea.

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Bermuda Day 3

Another rainy day. Dinghies tied up at St. George’s Dinghy Club sink. Bermuda 1-2 participants, as well as cruise ship passengers, tend to congregate in bars to drink when there’s nothing else to do, and we are no exception. Later in the day, I read a book on marine electrical systems, and start another, interesting one, named Man Walks into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer (reviews here and here).

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Bermuda Day 4

The rain stops, the Bermuda sun comes out again, the dinghies are re-floated, and I get around to taking some pictures. (Now that I have a disposable underwater camera with me, I’m unable to reproduce the display from the first day’s snorkeling; the currents are stronger and the fish are sparser at Tobacco Bay Beach, where I am today.)

Last night, I had rented a scooter. Here’s what it’s like to ride a scooter on a Bermudian street [movie, 1.8MB, requires QuickTime 5 or later], if you happen to be a digital camera on a strap that hangs low enough for most of the scenery to be blotted out by the handlebars.

Over dinner, my father and I go over the weather maps I had downloaded through a sail shop’s Internet connection into a laptop, to decide on a strategy for handling the Gulf Stream. (My contributions to the process consist mostly of nods, with some mouse clicks to mark the course thrown in.) Because of a strong opposing Gulf Stream current on the rhumb line, the choice for each sailor to make was whether to go east of it, risking rough weather before crossing the Stream and light wind in possibly the wrong direction after, or to go west of it, which was a long way out of the way. We decide to go west.

Movie: Panning at night [1.1MB, requires QuickTime 6 or later]

Race Day 1

The race gets off to a fast start as many of the boats head out of the narrow cut flying spinnakers (which we choose not to do, probably wisely, given the thrashing that some of the spinnakers sustained when the wind picked up outside the cut).

I would have a picture here of two boats on spinnaker heading through the cut toward us, thus proving that for some small amount of time we were ahead of some other boats, but my disposable camera ran out of film at that moment.

We’ve changed our plans, and will now go east.

Race Day 2 - 4

The wind is at 35 knots, with rough seas. Apparently rougher than my stomach can take. It’s what sailors refer to as a “washing machine.” About once a minute, the boat hits a wave more violently than usual, producing a cannon-like jolt and a wave that washes over the entire boat. As I lay in my bunk, leaks around the mast send a stream of water over my feet for a few seconds after each crash. (It may have been my imagination, but even though both of our digital water temperature gauges had conked out well before we finally left the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, I think I could still tell when it happened because the water on my feet got colder.)

We’re tacked over at 45 degrees, so it’s difficult to stand, especially since there’s water all over the place. (Have you ever tried to change clothes on a completely slick floor pitching around erratically at an average 45-degree angle? Well, I’m sure someone would find it comical.)

At one point, my father’s bunk slid toward me out of its track and crashed to the floor, while he was in it. Both of us have a lot of bruises from these few days.

By day 4, we still had 35-knot winds and bad weather, but other boats measured worse. During the daily radio chat time, there were reports of 50-knot winds. One boat had something of an off-scale reading when the wind gauge blew off the mast.

The sailinganarchy.com report describes the conditions:

The rough seas and high winds caused a fair amount of damage in the fleet, including severely compromising the lower rudder bearing on Mike DeLorenzo's J boat, Coltrane. Unfortunately for the rest of Class II, his rudder problems did not seem to slow him up too much. Rich and Jan blew out their main sail, which was then patched up with duct tape and thread. Then they blew up their #2 head sail. On Indigo, we ripped the mount box for our hydraulic ram out of the side of the boat, blew up our vang, blew up the turning block for our main halyard, put a rip in our Asym, and put a rip in our Jib Top. Also, our Harken furler shook all of its set screws into the inky deep, leaving us with no furling capabilities....

We get off relatively lightly, with a loose radar reflector and flaky (water-induced?) DC electrical panel readouts.

Even though we’re tearing through the water at 7 knots, the Gulf Stream current is against us, so we’re going half that speed over the ground.

I miss cold drinks and refrigerated food, though Balance Satisfaction bars are pretty good.

Race Day 5

Sick again. Since it’s working so poorly, I stop taking seasickness medicine, and within a few hours feel much better. I had been feeling unusually groggy and sluggish ever since taking the first pill. (Though of course that in itself doesn’t prove that it was the medicine’s fault.) Being sick for a minute every so often seems much better to me at this point than feeling inert all the time. As it happens, I’m not sick again.

Later, the wind dies, but the seas stay just as rough. So we’re being tossed around in place.

We wonder why we don’t seem to be out of the Gulf Stream yet. It turns out that east was the wrong way to go. We were briefly out of the Stream, then went right back into the one bit that we were trying to avoid, which had moved east to meet the fleet. Indigo writes:

Almost everybody chose to go east, and we all regretted it...

My pillow has lost its loft. In fact, as I lay my head back into it, it flattens and water squeezes out.

Race Day 6 - 7

The wind has died completely, leaving us at a standstill 140 miles from Newport. If we still have any speed through the water, our digital knotmeter lacks enough decimal places to register it. The water is calm, and we can see jellyfish next to the boat, outpacing us. A group of dolphins swim by as well, but apparently have somewhere better to be. We raise the spinnaker and lower it again a couple of times, to try to catch pockets of wind that start small, become too great for the spinnaker, and then die again.

With no wind, our attentions turn to the loose radar reflector, which has been flapping around and banging against the mast and sail. My father climbs the mast in a bosun’s chair as I hoist a safety rope, from which he swings to cut down the reflector, which falls neatly into the ocean.

My father puts his books, which have been sloshing around in the water below, out on deck to dry.

I take a break from drinking only water. Warm orange juice isn’t quite as bad as I expected.

A Concorde overhead (on what must have been one of its last few flights before they are all retired) treats us to its sonic boom, which sounds like being shot twice in quick succession. Mobsters and police officers must hate that. Over the radio, the skipper of another boat complains that he wasted a cupful of coffee from the surprise.

The water is glassy, and haze makes the horizon invisible. The sky and sea blend together into a continuous blue field, in every direction. There is no sign of land, other ships, or motion. We’re in limbo.

The water is only 190 feet deep. If I had a 200-foot pole, I could punt the rest of the way, but it would probably be against the rules.

Toward sunset on both days, the wind picks up a little, the water develops ripples, and we make some headway overnight.

All the remaining boats had managed to squeeze into port before the wind died on Thursday, so we’re the last people at sea. At least we may get an Onion award for being last.

Race Day 8

To the cheers of the throngs gathered along Newport’s shores, we speed through the tape across the finish line. That’s not entirely true. We pass the final buoy at 3:29 AM, on a silent, densely foggy night, going at 1.1 MPH. At 5 AM, we pick up a mooring and sleep for a couple of hours while the rest of the world wakes up.

On the radio, we hear for the first time that Everest Horizontal, the 50-foot around-the-world boat, capsized the second day of the race. The crew had to swim out from underneath and use their flares to alert a passing cruise ship, which rescued them.

I look forward to a dry apartment. Unfortunately, I arrive to find out that during my absence it has flooded. A hose in my toilet tank gave up just after I left, and was spurting water over my bathroom for several days, until the impending collapse of their ceiling prompted the people who live two stories below to call the landlord. (No one was there to notice when the water went through the unoccupied apartment one story below.) No severe damage done to my apartment, though.

We know we came last in elapsed time, but due to handicapping we are only second to last in corrected time, so another boat beats us to the Onion award.