“Get ready to tack!”

I only went to catch up with a friend. A nice, serene afternoon’s yachting. Turns out she’d been invited by a different group and I was spending the afternoon on a boat with ten strangers. Still, Cowes is pretty upmarket, a couple of gin and tonics on the back of an idling cruiser while we watched the pretty sailing festival. How bad could it be?

“Get ready to tack!”

11am, five hours after getting up and I’m on a yacht that doesn’t look too much like it’s built for pleasure. I can’t see any alcohol, for starters.

These are the words being calmly delivered by Simon, our captain. Sorry, ‘Skipper’:

“I want to stress this: I will break this boat before I let any of you break. Your safety is of paramount importance.”

As recently as 30 minutes earlier, in the heady, halcyon times before Simon had started the safety briefing and still seemed like an amiable chap, I hadn’t considered breakages of any nature, to be honest. I imagined a relaxed, but moreover intact afternoon, where passengers (sorry, ‘crew’) and vessel arrived back in the marina pretty much as they’d left it. A little more tanned and full of cocktails, but generally in one, identifiable without having to resort to dentists’  records, piece.

Simon had given us a once over on how a 40ft yacht works (out of the ten of us, three were professional crew, one had done a bit of sailing, and the rest of us were there for the aperitifs). If you’ve never been on a yacht built for competitive racing, let me explain in great detail the controls: there is a flipping great complicated load of ropes and winches, all of which are incredibly important.

We were given specific tasks: the salty seadogs were assigned the more technical jobs, while us landlubbers were separated into ‘beefy boys’ (ie. a couple of stocky, strong-looking guys who would work the controls to what I will call ‘the big sail’) and ‘the rest of you’ (ie. me and three girls – I assumed we might be in charge of dishing out snacks).

My group were assigned to moving the smaller ‘headsail’ at the front via ropes and winches at the back. The instructions were given rapidly, and because nothing on a boat is called what it is called on normal, natural, logical dry land (a rope is a ‘sheet’, the toilet is the ‘head’, etc), they may as well have been delivered in Swahili.

“I’ll just go over this again, quickly, Paul, so you get it this time. When the peppercorn is jamboxed, I’ll shout at you to start pampering mushrooms, and when you feel the hootenanny go completely vague, then start misting the codpiece as fast as you can. Alright?”

Alright. Well, not really, I didn’t understand a word, but I was sure I’d pick it up.

And if not, then nice, smiley Simon would let the boat break before he let me break, so everything’s sea shanties and seagulls, right? An hour or so on the calm, glinting waters of the Solent Channel. It would be bracing.

“Get ready to tack!”

One of the words I learned very early on into our journey was ‘tacking’. It involved moving the headsail via the ropes and the winches so it went from one side of the boat to the other and changed the direction really quickly. The boat sails at a steep angle, so it also changes from being about 45 degrees to the water on one side to being 45 degrees to the water on the other, so you’re shifting balance completely, and the crew has to scramble to change sides so they sit on the ‘high side’ at all times.

We did a couple of tacks in the calm waters of the marina (when the boat was pretty level), just to get our eye in, and though they were a bit clumsy, we got the theory.

“Get ready to tack!”

As we approached the start line – along with about 40 other boats in our race – what had been a tranquil harbour with all the nautical menace of a church pond had suddenly opened up, and had become what our skipper and first mate were calling with charming understatement ‘a bit choppy’. Still, they reassured us that they would never let things get to hairy, and Simon would, once again, let the boat break before he let any of us break. Something honked. We set off on our race.

“Get ready to tack!”

After 4 minutes or so, in which time I’d already fallen off my seat twice and was storing a litre of brine in each shoe, the order came. I was on winch duty, and my manoeuvring partner Daniela was pulling the rope. Sheet. Whatever. The pair on the other side released their winch, and Daniela pulled until she couldn’t any more, and I took over, winching the rope through mechanically. We’d done this quite well on calm seas, for a bunch of novices.

We were on the high side of the boat. Daniela pulled all she could, then retreated as the boat levelled and started to lift up on the other side as the sail moved across. I was now on the low side, being screamed at by the skipper to winch (‘grind’) as fast as I could. Not much else was on my mind, to be honest. When a 40-foot yacht is towering above you at a 70 degree angle, your main thought is how to change that situation.

So I’m winching. But not the relaxed winching I was doing in the marina. Because of the angle, the low side of the yacht is IN THE SEA. My foot is horizontal against the side of the yacht so also IN THE SEA. The sea is going quite fast and there’s honestly no shortage of it going in my face, thanks very much for asking. I’m FINE for water in my face.

I’m also fine for losing my balance, what with the sea and the wind and the ridiculous angle and not ever having been on a racing yacht before. Reader, I lost my grip. My immediate thought, after “Oh, I seem to have lost my grip and the floor isn’t where it’s supposed to be” was “Well, at least Simon will let the boat break before he lets me break”. I somehow hit the post that held up the wire handrail around the side of the yacht, my arms and legs luckily cushioning the blow with their soft, bruisable flesh, otherwise I might have been quite hurt.

As I lay there dazed, the sea a whole inch from my astonished face, I felt the reassuring shouts of Skipper Simon.

“Let him through! Let him through!”

Ah, he was clearing the deck so that one of the crew could help me up and pull me to safety.

“Get that winch going!”

Ah, he wasn’t doing any such thing. He was ordering someone else to take over my job so we didn’t lose time. I lay there for an amount of time I considered a suitable balance between indignant protest and not being swept overboard to a severe watery discourtesy, and slowly pulled myself up the vertiginous deck.

The squall passed, the boat levelled somewhat and I sat back, panting and nodding that I was OK to the few people that seemed concerned. I think the other first timers were trying not to think about when it would be their moment in the aquatic spotlight.

“Get ready to tack!”

The thing about Cowes sailing festival is that there are quite a lot of boats on the water. Imagine one of the those traffic roundabouts in Third World countries you see where no-one obeys the rules and there are cars coming from every direction. Now imagine that a hundred times bigger and in the unforgiving water and with huge but less easy to control vehicles.

We were in one race, but cutting through other people’s races, dodging official speedboats, looking out for buoys. In short, there’s a lot of tacking required. The Beefy Boys were involved in gibing, which hardly ever happened, their rippling muscles lying dormant. The order to tack came seemingly about every 45 seconds, my life now a constant cycle of physical stress, balancing under duress, spitting out litres of seawater and having two people scream at me but with opposing orders, and therefore not really doing either, increasing the intensity of both screams simultaneously.

Two hours later? The calm. We rounded a buoy, levelled out the boat, all sat down and out came the packed lunches. Battered and sea-swept, we sat back, ate ravenously and caught our breath. It was actually pleasant, gliding along, the sun on our faces, the sea gods appeased, much more like I’d pictured the entire afternoon, but with more skin loss and shooting pains in my arm. Anyway, after two hours, we could look forward to heading back to the marina, changing out of our sodden clothes, booking a trauma counselling session for the next day and a nice Valium Martini.

“20 minutes,” announced the skipper.

“Until we get back to the harbour?” I asked. “That’s such a relief. Thanks for getting us round the course.”

“Er, no,” he said. “Until we start the second half of the race.”

“GET READY TO TACK!”

Every time this order was issued over the following two more hours in what were euphemistically called ‘testing’ conditions, my hysteria rose. During lunch, I texted my friend to find out where she was, her reply being that it was slightly too sunny in the area around the champagne tent. I did look for sympathy, but I think it had been driven out of me via a brine enema.

Two more hours of near-constant tacking. The seadogs at the front had changed one pole ONCE, and in calm seas. The Beefy Boys had just had to move a rope a couple of times. Two of our four-person tack team were sitting at the back, sunning themselves, forcing the first mate to jump in as back-up, and meaning for the second half, I was involved in every single tack and not just alternate ones. Sometime into the third hour, we hit a straight run, and I clambered up the high side, held onto the pole that had previously saved me, and dreamily watched the seagulls, nimbly flying around, turning in the air at will, unbound by earthly laws, societal pressures or morality. How free they were, how noble and graceful in their flight, how pure and sleek and heavenly.

“GET READY TO TACK!”

Yes…I heard you…as if in a dream…I’m going to tack now…look, see how well I tack…this is my life now…I’m ready to tack….always…ready to tack…

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