About Time
Today marks the start of week six of our race. We have now all spent 35 days at sea alone. I have been asked a lot if the time has gone quickly. Do I notice the passage of time? I think what people want to know really is am I marking off the days at sea, or the days till I get back home. But the reality is that time has taken on a completely different meaning to me which has become more pronounced in the last week, as I head East and the dawn becomes earlier each day.
The short answer is that I consider time, it forms an important part of my day, my weather forecasts are based around time. I am aware of how many hours I sleep, I know how long the night time is, I know how long it takes to change a sail. My food is in day bags, my clothes in week bags and I am being disciplined enough to stick with this regime. But other than these practical markers in my day, I hardly notice the passage of time. I exist in a bubble, where the date and the month do not matter. I have one job to do, day or night and my world is governed by geography rather than time. I never notice the hours going past in a day; just the jobs being ticked off, the speed of the boat, the rise and fall of the barometer, the change in direction and speed of the wind. It is a world with no frills but full of purpose. Every action I take, whether trimming a sail or taking a nap has an impact. I am only out here for one reason and I spend every hour of every day fulfilling that objective. In this way time passes quickly because I am happy and fulfilled.
At home our concept of time is governed by key markers in the day: starting work or school, lunch time, home time, TV programs, meeting friends in the evening, bed time. Days are constructed so that most activity happens during daylight hours and we sleep through the night and wake up with the dawn. Though I also choose to do most of my jobs during the day, out here there are no communal markers which denote for me the passage of time. I eat when I am hungry, I sleep when I have opportunity or when I can no longer function on the level that I need. I work when there is work to be done. There are no other demands on my time, I am just here to sail. I keep a note of the days and the weeks that have gone past, merely as a reference to the outside world. In reality what I am interested in is the passage of geography and weather.
Despite this, in the last week I have had to readjust some of my expectations around time. We are stuck with some very strange weather and I have been for one week now, meandering along in light winds and sunshine, uncharacteristic for this part of the ocean and this time of year. A full week of light winds when I should have expected strong tail winds has inevitably had an impact on the overall time in which I might expect to finish this race. I have given a nod to the fact that my race finish time may well be a week longer than I had hoped for at the start, but as I am not counting down the days to the finish this has had no real effect on my morale. Simply an acknowledgment that the weather has changed the goal posts - something to be understood and accepted as normal by any offshore sailor.
When I went out on deck to gybe the spinnaker this morning a foggy damp dawn was just breaking. I glanced at my watch, which is still set to UTC, as I went on deck, it said 0100. I've been working up there for a couple of hours and am now back at my computer, trying to warm my fingers around a hot drink (which is actually a disappointing experience with a thermal mug) the time now reads 0310 and the day is fully upon me. Local time is of course based around the passage of the sun, with noon being the time at which the sun is highest in the sky. Longitude is calculated from the difference in hours and minutes between the sun reaching its zenith in any given location in relation to noon UTC. I keep my time onboard the boat to UTC (you may know it as GMT) not so I can measure longitude but because all weather forecasts are issued in UTC so it makes sense to run my ships time in the same zone. My small shore team are also based in the UK, so to avoid any confusion, especially with communications with my sponsors; Medallia, who are on the West coast of the US we keep all timings to UTC. And so stuck on UTC and with my dawn breaking earlier and earlier every degree I sail east, the hour of the day holds less and less relevance other than to the weather.
I know there will be times, especially in the forthcoming weeks where the passage of time will not be such a gentle affair. I can remember several occasions in my racing past, where the wind has been howling through the rig, the boat being endlessly battered by the sea and I have sat, watching the hours going past, willing the storm to abate, feeling every excruciating second. I guess this is the result of being scared or unhappy and I am lucky that out here, those times are few. Once again, I am reminded of what a privilege it is to take part in this sport. To have the time and the space in my life for unremitting focus, to be totally absorbed in something I love and free to give it everything that I have is a unique pleasure and something that is hard to achieve while still attached to the land and the drumbeat of life around us.