A Crew of One Had the Busiest Week at Sea

The chart table on a delivery boat at three in the morning is the loneliest desk I know. I have sat at a good many of them, a mug going cold by the log book and five people asleep below, and even then I was never really alone, because somebody came up at four. This week the wire was full of sailors for whom nobody comes up at four.

It began in a theatre. On the 22nd the whole fleet of the Route du Rhum 2026 was gathered in Paris, and Voile & Moteur put its questions to the skippers at the Folies Bergère. The count is 118 skippers, and the same article calls them the entire fleet, which is the whole character of the race in one number: the sailors and the boats come out even. I imagine it is the last afternoon of the campaign when any of them will be in a room with the other hundred and seventeen.

Some of them had barely come off the water. Sailorz caught Anthony Marchand, forty-one, back on the Friday morning from forty-eight hours of training with the Pôle Finistère off Port-la-Forêt and already on the road to Laval. Of sailing the Rhum in an Ultim he says it is "even above the dream", and I believe him, because nobody who has just done two nights of drills at sea says anything they do not mean. The same outlet's transfer column has Guirec Soudée entered in an Ultim as well.

The story I read twice was Alexia Barrier's. In January she skippered the first all-female crew to finish a non-stop voyage around the world aboard a maxi-trimaran, and All At Sea reports that she is chasing another first at the Route du Rhum. Nine months ago she had a full crew to share the watches. Now she has entered a start line where the watch rota is a list of one name. I have handed over a helm at dawn to someone who had brought me tea, and I do not think I understood what that small ceremony was worth until I read this.

Then there is patience, which solo racing seems to demand in a larger dose than any other kind. Yachting World tells how Alexis Loison won the Solitaire du Figaro after 19 attempts, two decades of chasing one race. His line in the headline is the best short description of the job I have read: "In solo racing you have to be good at everything." On every boat I ever crewed I was good at one thing and passable at two, and the rest belonged to somebody else. The solo sailor has no somebody else. Nineteen goes at it is what everything costs.

And while the Paris fleet was answering questions, the Golden Globe Race was out in real weather. Mysailing reports that tropical storm Gonzalo collided with the fleet near Cabo Verde, with fierce winds and dangerous seas for the solo sailors. Seilmagasinet puts it more plainly for its Norwegian readers: the trade wind is over, and their own sailor, Mara, may do well from lying to the west. Their weekly update from a few days earlier had already counted two men out of the race, and things had gone wrong for the Swede Pär Nyman. By the 26th Afloat had the leaders nearing the equatorial south-easterlies, with extreme weather registered in at least half a dozen places around the world. I have watched a tropical storm track only once in my life, on a screen in a marina office with every line doubled, and I was glad of the walls.

The big trimarans had their own dress rehearsal. The fifth 24H Ultim gathered the Ultims and the Ocean Fifties at Lorient La Base on the Wednesday morning, and by Saturday Tom Laperche had brought SVR-Lazartigue over the line at 7.28, with Basile Bourgnon following on his Ocean Fifty less than an hour and a half later, both on the podium. Twenty-four hours is not an ocean, but it is long enough for a boat that size to tell you what it will not forgive.

What moved me more was the small end of the fleet, where nobody is sponsored and the risk is exactly as real. Seilmagasinet found plenty of drama at the Silverrudder, which it calls the biggest solo race in the world, and a Norwegian entrant who is now asking questions about its safety. That is the right question, asked by the right person, the one who was out there. Zeilen published Linda's account of crossing Biscay on her own, written for anyone wondering how a crossing of several days works with nobody to wake, and a second piece on five days sailing solo through the Netherlands. These are the people who will read the Rhum tracker every morning and know exactly what they are looking at.

And there is Konstantin Kurzeja, from Munich, whom YACHT calls the Mini-Teenager. He turned fifteen on the 26th, he has just taken second place in the Mare Nostrum, and YACHT sums up his birthday wishes as everything for sailing. At fifteen I wanted a bicycle. He wants the sea, which has never been known to give anyone everything, though it gives the patient ones a surprising amount.

I sailed alone exactly once, for six hours, bringing a borrowed boat across a bay while her owner drove round with the car. It was a flat calm afternoon and I talked to the boat the whole way. Somewhere west of Cabo Verde this week a lee cloth is holding a sleeping sailor into a bunk for twenty minutes at a time, and there is a mug on the chart table going cold with nobody coming up at four to drink it.