Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World's Most Dangerous Waters - Hardcover

Lundy, Derek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565122291 ISBN 13: 9781565122291

Verlag: Algonquin Books, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Godforsaken Sea is the hair-raising account of the world's most demanding, dangerous, and deadly sailing race. Around the world, one sailor, one boat, no stops, no assistance.

Author Derek Lundy's vivid book follows the field of the 1996 - 1997 Vendee Globe through the race's grueling four-month circumnavigation of the globe, most of it through the terror of the Southern Ocean.

Lundy narrates the race through the eyes and experiences of sixteen sailors - fourteen men and two women - who embdoy the best and most eccentric aspects of our human condition. There's the gallant Brit who spends days beating back against the worst seas to save a fellow sailor; the Frenchman who bothers to salvage only a bottle of champagne from his broken and sinking boat; the sailor who comes to love the albatross that trails her for months, naming it Bernard; the sailor who calmly smokes a cigarette as his boat capsizes; and the Canadian who, hours before he disappears forever, dispatches this message:

If you drag things out too long here, you're sure to come to grief.

With the literary touch of Saint-Exupery and Conrad, Derek Lundy harnesses hurricane-force winds, six story waves, icebergs, and deafening noise. And he lays bare the spirit of the men and women who push themselves to the outer limits of human endeavor - even if it means never returning home.

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Godforsaken Sea is the hair-raising account of the world's most demanding and dangerous sailing race: around the world, one sailor, one boat, no stops, no assistance.

This is the story of the 1996-1997 Vendee Glove, a grueling four-month circumnavigation of the glove in the most dangerous of all waters, the Southern Ocean. Through the eyes and experiences of the fourteen men and two women who began the race, author Derek Lundy harnesses the hurricane-force winds, the six-story waves, the icebergs, Dan the deafening noise in an effort to expose the spirit of the men and women who push themselves to the outer limits of human endeavor - even if it means never returning home.

You'll meet the gallant Brit who spends days beating back against the worst seas to save a fellow racer; the Frenchman who bothers to salvage only a bottle of champagne from his broken and sinking boat; the sailor who comes to love the albatross that trails her for months, naming it Bernard; the veteran who calmly keeps smoking his cigarette as his boat capsizes; and the Canadian who, hours before he disappears forever, dispatches this message:

If you drag things out too long here, you're sure to come to grief.

With the literary touch of Conrad and Saint-Exupery, Derek Lundy elevates a compelling story into an eloquent meditation on danger and an appreciation of danger seeks who embody the best and most eccentric aspects of our human condition.

This is the story of the 1996-1997 Vendee Glove, a grueling four-month circumnavigation of the glove in the most dangerous of all waters, the Southern Ocean. Through the eyes and experiences of the fourteen men and two women who began the race, author Derek Lundy harnesses the hurricane-force winds, the six-story waves, the icebergs, Dan the deafening noise in an effort to expose the spirit of the men and women who push themselves to the outer limits of human endeavor - even if it means never returning home.

You'll meet the gallant Brit who spends days beating back against the worst seas to save a fellow racer; the Frenchman who bothers to salvage only a bottle of champagne from his broken and sinking boat; the sailor who comes to love the albatross that trails her for months, naming it Bernard; the veteran who calmly keeps smoking his cigarette as his boat capsizes; and the Canadian who, hours before he disappears forever, dispatches this message:

If you drag things out too long here, you're sure to come to grief.

With the literary touch of Conrad and Saint-Exupery, Derek Lundy elevates a compelling story into an eloquent meditation on danger and an appreciation of danger seeks who embody the best and most eccentric aspects of our human condition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

In the Seas Entrall

an excerpt from Chapter One of Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World's Most Dangerous Waters

by Derek Lundy

In early January 1997, thirteen Vend,e Globe solo sailors were strung out across six thousand miles of the Southern Ocean, stretching from south of Australia almost to Cape Horn. The sailors had already been at sea for more than two months. Of the sixteen starters, only ten were still officially in the race. Three more kept sailing but had been disqualified for stopping in one port or another along the way to make repairs to their boats-strictly prohibited by the race rules. Dinelli had been sailing as an unofficial entrant because he hadn't had time to make the two-thousand-mile sail required to qualify for the Vend,e Globe. Two racers had withdrawn soon after the start on November 3 of the previous year because of damage suffered in a storm in the Bay of Biscay.

Deep in the Southern Ocean, the skippers had lived for weeks in wet foul-weather gear in cold cabins dripping with condensation or wet with seawater that found a way in. The widely spaced boats were dealing with various weather conditions, none of them pleasant. At best, some were running uncomfortably, but not dangerously, before the

gale-force depressions that travel unceasingly across the high southern latitudes. For other boats, there wasn't enough wind to enable them to handle the sea conditions-big seas persist for some time after the weather that created them has moderated. The boats were faltering in waves that struck anarchically from all directions without the governing discipline of strong wind.

Other skippers found themselves in particularly severe low-pressure systems-storms that made our Virgin Islands "yachtsman's gale" seem like the briefest and most benign of squalls. They were struggling to control their boats as they surfed at breakneck speeds of twenty-five knots or more down waves like steep hills in winds of near-hurricane strength.

In just those conditions, during the night of January 4, two of the sixty-foot-long Vend,e Globe boats capsized. They were sailing fourteen hundred miles southwest of the Australian Cape Leeuwin at about fifty-one degrees south latitude-just inside the border of the furious fifties. The boats were within forty miles of each other, near the back of the strung-out fleet.

Aboard Exide Challenger (a sophisticated ketch-a two-masted rig), Tony Bullimore heard a loud bang. He could hear it even over the shrill tumult of his boat's rush through the storm. The carbon-fiber keel, fatally fatigued by the boat's unending motion, had suddenly snapped off, plunging down to the ocean floor-in this sea area, the relatively shallow southeast Indian Ridge, five hundred fathoms down. Suddenly deprived of its four and a half tons of ballast, the now top-heavy boat flipped over with shocking speed-two or three seconds. Just before it happened, the fifty-seven-year-old Bullimore had been standing wedged in his cabin, drinking a mug of tea he'd managed to brew up on his gimballed one-burner stove and smoking one of his roll-your-own cigarettes. As the boat flipped, he rolled around with it and found himself standing on the cabin top, which was now the floor.

The abruptness of the event astonished him. He looked down through the big cabin windows, which were now acting as the bottom of the hull, and saw seawater rushing past, like a fast-flowing river under his feet. The howl of the wind passing at seventy knots around the boat's two masts and rigging had stopped. In fact, it was almost quiet-although the boat was still rocking and rolling.

His mug of tea had disappeared, but he still had his cigarette in hand. He stood on the inside cabin top of his upside-down boat, took a few draws on the cigarette, and phlegmatically considered the situation. There wasn't much he could do, he thought. He went through the pluses and minuses of his position, trying to think through how he could survive. He had to try to get an EPIRB signal out to the world. Maybe he could use his tools to cut a hole in the hull. He became aware of the boat's heavy boom, mixed up with the tangle of mast and rigging below the boat. Swinging around in the underwater turbulence, it was tapping on one of the big cabin windows.

Suddenly, in one violent lurch, the boom smashed the window. The sea roared in like Niagara Falls. The electric lights, which had stayed on since the capsize, now went dead. Within seconds, the dark cabin filled with water whose temperature was close to zero degrees Celsius, leaving only a few feet of air near the top, which was really the cabin floor. Bullimore quickly became very cold. He waded through the chest-high water, found his survival suit, stripped off his foul-weather gear-which only protected him from rain, spray, and the occasional breaking wave-and managed to pull the suit on over his cold and sodden underclothes. The insulated waterproof survival suit was designed to stave off hypothermia, but it was a model that left his hands and feet exposed, and all he could do was stuff his already frozen feet back into his soaked seaboots.

His food and drinking water were gone, except for some chocolate and several tiny sachets of water-a cup or so. Like most of the equipment in the cabin, his food and water had been sucked out through the smashed window by the powerful vacuum of departing waves.

There was no need now to cut a hole in the hull to release an EPIRB signal; the boom had done it for him. He activated one of his ARGOS-type EPIRBs and tied it to a piece of line. (The ARGOS position transmitter became an EPIRB when switched to alarm mode.) Plunging down into the freezing water in the cabin, he pushed it through the broken window and floated it up to what he hoped was the surface of the sea, but it could easily have become entangled in the mess of rigging and debris outside. Bullimore wasn't sure that his distress transmission was in fact getting out.

Whether Exide Challenger would stay afloat depended on his watertight bulkheads, in particular on the forward bulkhead, which was keeping water out of the boat's bow section. In case they didn't hold, he needed his life raft, which was secured in the cockpit. Several times, his eyes and ears seared by the cold, he dove down and through the companionway hatch to cut it free. But it was too bulky to move, pinned against the bottom of the inverted cockpit by its own buoyancy. On his last dive, the hatch was caught by a surge of wave water and slammed shut on his hand. It chopped off his left index finger at the lower knuckle. In the icy water, the stub soon stopped bleeding and the cold numbed the fiery pain.

Bullimore crawled onto a narrow shelf high up under his new ceiling, where it was relatively dry for now. But the water was rising and it soon began to wash over him periodically in this last refuge. He felt desperately cold and tired. He knew that the Australians were his best hope for rescue, but it would take them at least four or five days to get to him. That is, if the EPIRB had made it to the surface-if its signal was getting through to anyone at all.

Copyright (c) 1999 by Derek Lundy. All rights reserved.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Algonquin Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1565122291
• ISBN 13: 9781565122291
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EDITIONS GALLIMARD; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien