It’s mid-December, and I’m more than 3,500 miles from Cape Town, South Africa, bound for Fremantle, Australia, having—at the moment—too much fun. Indian Ocean conditions are near perfect with 15 to 17 knots of wind at an apparent 120-degree angle. With 10-foot rolling waves, it’s a textbook surfing recipe for keeping the Clipper 70’s boatspeeds averaging 11 to 12 knots to maintain our sixth-place position in the Clipper Race fleet. Our similar sailing experience often leads to arguments about sail trim, tactics, and helming style.
We’ve been given a heading with instructions to “go f-ing fast.” I’ve been searching aggressively for good surf and getting the boat up to windspeed, but this has led to an off-course trend. As if on cue, Lottie Wade, the boat’s 27-year-old professional first mate, or Additional Qualified Person (AQP) in Clipper Race parlance, appears at the companionway. She deftly performs the tether dance, quickly clipping and unclipping her two safety tethers so she constantly remains attached to the boat while moving around six or seven crew and through 20 feet of cockpit. She dives under the mainsheet traveler popping up next to me at the helm.
“I’m seeing a lot of 30s on COG,” she says with her “Stokie” British accent, referring to the course over ground heading. “We need 50, come up.”
Lottie is a badass, unintimidated by the Type A middle-aged men and other pretentious crew aboard CV29, aka . She also instigates a lot of fun; we are lucky to have her as AQP. Her demand for the higher heading means living on the edge with our Code 2 spinnaker at a 90-degree wind angle, so we suffer a few flogs on my way to finding the new groove. After 10 hours, we approach the final turning mark nearly 20 miles from the finish line of Leg 3 of this circumnavigation and are about to drop the spinnaker. Our nine-person watch crew is scurrying around the cockpit getting ready for the evolution. Red-light headtorches flash across lines and winches in the early-morning darkness. Everyone is tired and ready to be on shore, but
