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Posts from the ‘Readings’ Category

Oct 18

Frozen flower
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Good news

Visit Finland crew are battling ferocious depressions in Southern Ocean, while I am curling in front of a fireplace with books, tea and tissues. The autumn flu season has arrived with the frosty temperatures outdoors.

My fractured wrist bones are now stronger than ever, based on radiographs taken today. From now on I can put more load on the wrist at the gym and also ignore minor pains. It has been tricky to exercise the wrist when I haven’t been completely sure about the nature of the sharp pain with long term throbbing dullness in it, which paradoxically emerges when exercising too much or too little. In my worst nightmares the fractured bones have broken loose and grinding against each other like in a hand-sized meat maracas. This is not the case – I repeat – my wrist is solid. Read more

Sep 25

Wrist fracture
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Anatomy of idleness

A friend taught me how to slip correctly, more accurately avoiding breaking any wrist bones (as they are notoriously slow to mend).

“Just huddle your arms close to your body whilst falling, then hit the ground and crack a rib. They cannot put ribs in cast, so you could have carried on with the race.” he said. This friend is a qualified medical practitioner. A new lesson learnt, it is preferable to choose damage that does not interfere with the activity, unless of course the said rib punctures a lung, in which case the injury might be an issue for general well-being.

Faced with at least three more weeks of idleness in a small Finnish town, I wish having cracked a rib instead and currently soldering on across Southern Atlantic towards Cape Town with team mates. “What is worth a full fridgeful of fresh food, steady king-sized bed or modern comforts, if you don’t feel alive? I’d rather be cold, wet and eating tinned cat food every day on board with you guys.”I lamented in Rio while packing my kit. “That’s because you’re crazy” Greg suggested. Read more

Jan 4

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Watch out for that boom

With the America’s Cup destination decided, a study identifying sailing injuries is timely

PROVIDENCE, RI – Just as the site for the 2013 America’s Cup has been announced, a study from Rhode Island Hospital highlights that the sport isn’t always smooth sailing. The study was published recently in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine.

Through an on-line survey completed by sailors, researchers at Rhode Island Hospital have pieced together a report of the injuries that occur on two types of boats — dinghies (small boats with crews of one or two) and keel boats (larger boats like those used in the America’s Cup races with a crew of up to 16).

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Apr 11

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Ropes are here to confuse us

Should you want some light and funny reading, I can warmly recommend trying Three men in a boat by Jerome K. Jerome. Written over hundred years ago (1889), it is remarkably timeless read about three friends’ boat trip along Thames and various giggle-inducing situations they manage to cook up. The book is full of wonderful wisdom about boats, for example. And ropes – oh it rings so true:

There is something very strange and unaccountable about a tow-line. You roll it up with as much patience and care as you would take to fold up a new pair of trousers, and five minutes afterwards, when you pick it up, it is one ghastly, soul-revolting tangle.

I do not wish to be insulting, but I firmly believe that if you took an average tow-line, and stretched it out straight across the middle of a field, and them turned your back on it for thirty seconds, that, when you looked round again, you would find that it had got itself altogether in a heap in the middle of the field, and had twisted itself up, and tied itself into knots, and lost its two ends, and become all loops; and it would take a good half-hour, sitting down there on the grass and swearing all the while, to disentagle it again.

That is my opinion of tow-lines in general. Of course, there may be honourable exceptions; I do not say that there are not. There may be tow-lines that are a credit to their profession- conscientious, respectable tow-lines – tow-lines that do not imagine they are crotchet-work, and try to knit themselves up into antimacassars the instant they are left to themselves. I say there may be such tow-lines; I sincerely hope there are. But I have not met with them.

That is so true. During the first training week it felt that every ten minutes we were tidying up the cockpit: coiling lines, springs, making elephant ears around winches and creating some order into rope-chaos that ensued any headsail change, mainsail reef or a tack. It was very strange – as you were just sitting there peacefully doing nothing in particular, suddenly all sheets and halyards were in a happy tangle as described by Jerome K. Jerome. The ropes, they MUST be alive somehow.