Why?

Hello all!

To begin the series aboard Noa's Ark, I thought I'd address the questions: why now and why a blog? Pretty legitimate questions. I am sitting in mildly boring Tubingen, Germany, finishing a semester at university. I am not on an Ark. In fact I’ve never felt further from the sea. And I’m certainly also not in an exotic or remotely exciting location. If you've never heard of Tubingen, this is unsurprising. Do come visit, maybe for an hour, two hours at a push. That perhaps brutal summary of Tubingen answers the question, why now. Because I have the time and internet speed. Secondly, because being back at university forces one to think about the future. Those who know me will know that this does not come naturally. However, when thinking about the future, the only thing that doesn't fill me with boredom, dread, fear, or one hundred other negative emotions, is travel journalism. Truth is, I met a man recently, employed by the New York Times for a bimonthly sailing column, and I want his job. So to come clean, this blog is partly a future planning move so as when some potential employer asks for a piece of my work or a portfolio, I don’t have to scroll through pages of iPhone notes in a desperate attempt to find something that’s not my pin or forgotten passwords. In other words, it’s a desperate move and I’m not a fan of writing about myself. But here goes!

Why on Wix.com? Because the adverts are so annoying that I always click on them to make them stop. Credit must go to the marketing team. It’s a strategy I’ve not come across: be so annoying, you get customers. Maybe that’ll be the blog strategy too… I hope to annoy/enthral, and bore/entertain anyone who reads about what was (to me anyway) a fun, excitement-filled life aboard a bunch of boats!

It's difficult to know where to start. At the very beginning when animals came in two-by-two? No, don’t remember much of that – I was too young when I saved the world. With my first sailing experience doing my competent crew qualification on the Isle of White? Don’t remember much of that either. So, I’ll begin with the summer of 2020, the end of my second year of university. I packed up my belongings in my flat in St Andrews, and naively boarded a Beneteau First 38 intending to sail twice around the British Iles, without stopping. The double circumnavigation had never been done before and was going to feature in the Guinness Book of World Records. A real challenge, fucking awesome I thought. We made it from Port Edgar, Edinburgh, to Eyemouth. For those not familiar, this is a grand total of 50 miles and about an eight-hour sail. Even that’s an over exaggeration as the last ten miles were aided by the RNLI. We were towed back in to port by the coastguard. Apologies to the skipper and owner of Siesta of Lee, if you ever read this blog, but it was a horrific experience and I have since vowed to be more cautious of who I step on board with. In many ways, thank you for a valuable lesson. It was a steep learning curve, and I returned to St Andrews feeling lost. A plan of 8 weeks had gone to shit in 4 days. However, there were some definite positives of the experience: greater wisdom and a better judgement of people, and most of all getting to know Giacomo. We bonded very quickly through shared trauma aboard Siesta and I would now consider him one of my BESTEST friends – love you Giac! Both passionate sailors and keen for more experience, we would take anything we could get. The Guinness World Book of Records no longer mattered. We spent a couple hopeless days filling out infinite forms offering ourselves up for delivery crew, mates, cleaners, cooks – anything on a sailing boat! During this time, I introduced Giac to an entirely normal, if not encouraged habit for St Andrews students: eating food out of the M&S bins. This glorified dumpster diving on top of sleeping on the floor in our still-sodden sailing sleeping bags did make it somewhat of a desperate time. Regardless, we should not have worried as some days later we were merrily on our way to our first delivery.

Halcyon needed two crew for the delivery of a Contessa 32 to Falmouth, UK, from Workum in the Netherlands; we were lucky to get it despite our complete lack of experience. Giac and I latched onto this opportunity to fulfil all our sailing dreams. The skipper, R certainly had different expectations of the trip and was hugely shocked when he came to pick us up from the station and was met with what seemed to be two over-excited 12-year-olds. We were far from the professional crew R had no doubt been awaiting. Aboard Ithaka we were chucked into the thick of it and what we lacked in experience, we made up for with enthusiasm. I would like to think R was grateful for our obedience and perhaps foolish gusto with which we approached every task. We experienced very real highs and lows of sailing. We dodged tankers in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, had calm windless days followed closely by a gale-force storm, and Ithaka began to fall apart system by system. We ran out of gas rendering the cooker useless, blew a fuse in the storm and lost all navigation systems; and of course, we also had a blocked toilet (yes, it was me and despite my relatively small size I have an awfully bad track record with blocking the heads). Here's a section of my notes page written on passage:

I started my first (ever) solo night shift eeeek! It was peaceful until it started to rain and thunder; the wind was picking up. It soon all went to shit and the delivery skipper, R, came out on deck. We crash gybed and the block of the main sheet came swinging across the traveller and straight on to my thumb. I chose this moment to stay polite: ‘could we please gybe again’; ‘apologies R, my thumb is stuck’. It was pitch black, R could not see my mangled thumb, nor my pained expression. I felt faint from the pain but mostly from the fear of seeing the stump of a thumb that remained once the block was removed. Despite my lack of clear communication, R cottoned on to the situation and we gybed back. The good news: my thumb remains attached. The bad: both stopper blocks on the main traveller had broken, and a fuse had blown which means no autohelm, chart plotter, VHF, or even the time. I wake up from a hugely interrupted 3-hour sleep to face the carnage of the night. For starters, the cockpit floor is tinted red with blood…

A few days later safely on land, my notes reads:

Despite the somewhat rocky passage, I would jump back on board Ithaka with R and Giacomo in a heartbeat. I love sailing <3

The famous quote from Giacomo will always stay with me: ‘chickens are kept in better conditions’. The true highs and lows, and the trip during which my love of sailing began.