The hall was full to bursting with HSCC members all eager to see and hear the first lecture of the New Year about Clipper racing. Having hacked their way through fallen trees, broken fences and undergrowth it felt like an ocean going venture just to arrive. The organisers however were almost holed below the water line when the guest speaker sank without trace, that’s when our wonderful member David Ramet came sailing over the horizon to give us the most scintillating talk (with slides) at a moment’s notice of his experience of the Arc rally over the “pond”.
As it would be for each of us it was a description of a very personal experience of a journey that made the talk so interesting. The very description of deciding which tack to take and physical feeling of the corkscrew effect over several thousand miles made for great empathy or was it sympathy? The fuzziness of the quickly scanned pictures gave immediacy to the occasion as though Dave had just stepped off the boat still swaying slightly while he got his land legs.
The pictures of the dolphins made us all long to experience the freedom of the open ocean. However Dave gave the most honest talk of the tedium of the watches over a period of time and the discomfort of the chosen sailing line. How scary it can be when you are alone on a watch in the middle of a squall with the boat well healed over. Also the realization that you are all alone and faraway from help when you spend hours in the middle of the night trying to sort out tangled sails. Moreover, as time progresses, how one copes or more to the point ignores equipment failure knowing the end of the journey is the objective. It made one think how sailors in the past made the journey with the most basic of equipment, simply the sails and the stars to sail by. The sense of achievement to have arrived at journey’s end must have been the most invigorating of experiences.
It was a wonderful talk to be given on a storm lashed day and it was great to see so many members of HSSC make the effort to come together and meet and share David’s once (or so he tells us) in a lifetime experience.
A.R.