Sail with New Freebooters

The races go on. In real life, on the Official Volvo online simulator and on the sailonline.org simulator, the doldrums await. The Great Leveller is about to wreak havoc with the hierarchies established over the past few days.

In real life, Telefonica Blue is back in contention after a 12-hour rest to get a badly-made tiller replaced and Ericsson 4 has lost surprisingly little ground after dropping off a crew member with a poisoned knee. Seven boats are spread out over more than a hundred miles from east to west, each rolling the navigational dice to select a route through the humid, variable winds of the latitudes just north of the equator.

I don’t know much about the Official Online Race, except that my boat hasn’t hit anything and that, for the first time, it has overtaken other boats - quite a lot of them. Since all I’ve done (apart from drop the spinnaker for a day after I’d been stationary trying to beat with it in the Med) is set a new compass course a couple of times a day, I’m satisfied with my progress.

The Sailonline race has me completely hooked. It’s close enough to actually sitting in an open sea racing navigator’s seat to have been a real training tool for me. I knew how to set a course, and had even done so a few times, but my race navigation was limited to cross-channel races in the days before VMG dials and GPS position-finding. The only person I’d ever heard discussing Polar Diagrams was Tony Markaj in his early days at Southampton University. I’d never heard of the GRidded Binary data format shared by the world’s weather forecasters, and had never tried to access marine weather data except through the UK met office web site.

For the past week, I’ve been using regularly-updated ocean weather forecasts and a polar diagram for a typical VO70 boat (which has even been updated once to reflect observed performance of the top boats in the race we are mimicking). I haven’t been at all rigorous - I’ve been trying to develop simple guidelines and tools such as bits of paper laid on my computer screen, to improve my ‘gut feel’ approach. Each day, I feel just a little bit more confident that I know what I’m doing, even if I’m making wrong decisions. Thanks in part to the fact that sailing downwind in a falling breeze compresses the fleet, I’m still only 80 nautical miles behind our fleet leader, and currently lying 134th in a fleet of 852 boats. I don’t feel too bad about that. It’s about where I believe I belong, but the doldrums are ahead.

When we escape to the other side, there will have been many drastic position changes. It’s unlikely that I’ll still be in roughly the same position on the leaderboard, and there are far more ways for me to lose places than for me to gain them. Since the simulator is written by Swedish programmers, I’m preparing gifts and entreaties for Njörðr, Norse god of seafaring, wind and wealth.

The other aspect of the Sailonline game that’s turned out to be fascinating is the people I’ve met on the associated chat interface.   The sailonline team themselves, always there to help and to discuss ways they can improve the game. The New Zealanders, whose progress in the leaderboard reflects the fact that they are awake and concentrating (when not singing the praises of Mt Gay Rum) during the other half of the 24-hour day from most of us. Americans from right across the continent. A mix of Brits that includes a 10-year old, a woman fire officer, owners of a wide variety of modern yachts, and a retired boatbuilder who spent 8 years renovating this 100-year old gaffer and now sails her, mostly singlehanded, to ports ranging from Brest to the Hook of Holland.

Thank you, Sailonline , for doing more than anyone else to re-integrate me with the sailing community that was the focus of  my life between the ages of 8 and 32, even if all I can do now is look on and spin yarns rather than physically participate.