A natural question from anyone who doesn’t sail on the ocean might be: do they sleep on these boats? The simple answer is yes. And no.
They don’t sleep well.
On the fastest boats in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, the crews expect to cover the entire 628 nautical miles in a day and a half. Sacrificing a good night’s sleep is nothing compared to the bragging rights of the competition. However, “sleep is a weapon,” said Christopher Lewis, navigator on LawConnect, a 100ft who recently won the Australian Maxi Championship and is due to race from Monday.
While the rest of the boat’s crew split into watch groups scheduled to alternate between sailing and sleeping, continuing day and night, Lewis, as navigator, will schedule siestas around weather forecast updates, radio schedules and transition points on the course.
Whenever he’s done his job and can reasonably expect conditions to stabilize a bit, it’s a call for sleep. Maybe it’s never enough, but he said: “Every time I have to force myself to step back, I ask, ‘do I want to sleep or do I want to win?'”
Chances are Lewis will have a warm hotel bed on his second night after leaving Sydney. Life is different on smaller, slower boats. Most sailors on these ships will be away for three days and three nights or more. There are well-established strategies for structuring work and rest. Three hours on watch and three hours off is a popular system, applied aboard Shane Kearns’ 34ft White Bay 6 Azzurro. But as a veteran of 18 races in Hobart, Kearns, the skipper and owner, has his own version of the three out, three out.
“The interior of the boat is small,” he said. “It doesn’t work having three people shooting their gear at the same time.” So, on his boat, he changes a person every hour for a three-hour shift. He added: “There are also advantages, because we never have three groggy people taking over for three tired people. When the new guy arrives on deck, he has time to connect.
Kearns knows it takes time to orient yourself – especially if it’s the second day or third night – crawling out of a bunk after three hours down, with less than three hours of sleep, maybe stuck in a bunk with a spare sail.
And there is a lot behind this word, orient. The breeze can rise or fall from what it was before. The front sail may have been changed. The seas could come from a new and embarrassing direction, slamming the hull, throwing the boat off course and straining the person at the helm.
Driving at night, the goal is to note the direction of the compass, then choose a star and aim for it. The rudder should be worked with alert finesse, no more than necessary; too much input slows the boat. And the stars move across the sky, so your lodestar from three hours ago won’t. Only when all of this is factored in is the new Watcher ready to join the fight.
Kearns said he was a 25-year veteran of the Australian Army, where he learned a lot about sleep deficit.
“They made us work all night and then tested what we could do,” he said. “You can’t ask civilians that. As skipper, Kearns has responsibilities that cut into his three hours off. It is his normality. Twenty-five years in the army, remember.
And Kearns can tell you what happens when things go wrong. He raced in 1998, the year a storm claimed five boats and killed six.
“When the storm hit, the surveillance system collapsed,” he said. “With six people on board, we kept two in the cockpit and four below, so at least we knew where those four were. But they weren’t sleeping. Dog sick and too thrown to sleep, it’s more like that. Thirty-six hours later we were calm off the Tasmanian coast, not a breath of wind.
And that, he might have added, is how breaks in yacht racing go. At least it’s a good chance for someone to catch up on sleep.
Then, again different, is the two-handed split, introduced last year, in which Martin Cross will race with his son John. But there are ironies.
“It’s called double hand, but you’re really sailing solo and then you pass the deck to your other solo,” said Martin Cross. “The only time we will be on deck, together, will be at the start and at the finish.
“We are planning three-hour shifts, but if I feel good, I could give John a little more time in the bunk and vice versa. We know for sure that we will both be tired.
It will be the first two-man Sydney Hobart for the father and the first for the son. Martin Cross once thought he could sail with his three sons, “but the babies got in the way”, he said.
Martin and his son have planned to train around John’s job, but both have extensive ocean experience and they’ve done enough together to have a fuss.
There was that race aboard their 33ft Transcendence Crento where Martin Cross said his sleeping son had to “swim from the deep.”
“I was literally screaming at him, and it wasn’t until I shook him hard that he regained consciousness,” he said.
In two-man racing, Martin Cross said: “The only advantage we have is that we are allowed to use an autopilot device. We don’t have to lead all the time.
The autohelm, or autopilot, can often perform as well or nearly as well as a human, and better than a fatigued human. This allows the person on watch to adjust the sails when the wind changes, to carry out inspections and repairs, to prepare meals, to wash dishes, to navigate, to consider strategies and to check the time. to see how much time is left before he’s finally off shift.
While father and son don’t expect to spend time together during the race, time spent viewing the race, planning the race, preparing the boat and running short races is a collaborative adventure. “It’s been a great bonding experience for both of us,” said Martin Cross. “John and I are closer now than we’ve ever been.”
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