Vendée Globe

A cursory glance at your course. The wind has shifted and strengthened.  The boat is suffering. She accelerates and digs into the waves at the end of each surf. The braking is violent.  This is where the danger lies. In this slowing down, the pressure of the wind on the sails, the mast and shrouds is dramatically increased.

Worrying thoughts pass through your mind as you think about this structure built around a huge number of parts, as one weak link can cause the whole thing to collapse.  Seeing what has happened to Mike and Loïc is unsettling. You need to do as much as you can to reduce the pressure and the solution is simple: accelerate.  By accelerating, you increase the lift on the hull and skip over the waves, while easing the thrust on the sails. The technique may seem paradoxical, but speed is your friend. You look like Yves Montand in the famous film, "The Wages of Fear" (or Roy Scheider in Sorceror, if you prefer).  Here, waves replace the dirt track and the nitroglycerine is replaced by the rigging. The worry is the same.  Avoid slowing down to avoid an explosion.  As for fear and wages, we can talk about that after Cape Horn, but the bill looks like it's going to be expensive.

By working on your course and the angle to the waves, the boat should be bale to glide along more smoothly. You have no other choice, but to go outside to trim the sails and in so doing you will face the icy wind. First, take your time to dress up properly. The goal is to add layers, as in this monk's cabin, with its shiny, smooth walls, which remind you of an operating theatre, it is as cold and wet as outside, except you are sheltered from the draught and wind. So you sleep and live in underclothes, fleeces, hats and bonnets.  To warm you, you have two family photos taken on a beach under the palm trees.  Occasionally, the hot plate and the engine offer a semblance of warmth, but this soon vanishes again.   

An additional fleece,  a balaclava, gloves and oilskins. Make sure everything is watertight around the cuffs and collar. There's nothing worse than icy water seeping in around your wrists and neck.  Right. Off we go.  Outside it truly feels like winter. But this is summer with the sun high in the sky and short nights. The gusts of wind are coming directly from the Antarctic freezer, the door of which appears to have been left open. With a temperature of 4°C and a wind in excess of thirty knots, it feels like a temperature of around -12°C.  So you work quickly, keeping an eye out to watch the waves coming.  Look out! There's one just now breaking over the coach roof.  If you hadn't seen it coming, you would have been soaked and wet clothes are impossible to dry down here.  
The gloves slip on the soaked sheets. You've no other choice but to take them off.  When they come into contact with the wind and water, your hands feel the cold and immediately go numb.  It hurts.  A tingling sensation with cramps paralysing the fingers. Not surprising really. In water, heat is thirty times more quickly than in the air.
In order to ensure that the body does not lose all its heat, it has its own way of dealing with this.  It hides inside itself to get way from the outside world.  The small blood vessels under the skin fulfil this role.  They contract, so that a minimum of blood is in contact with the outside. The human being is a warm-blooded creature, which works at around 37°C and cannot stand to be much colder or warmer. This chilled blood could cause the body not to work properly. The heart, for example.

That's it for the manoeuvres. Time for a quick tidy up.  The body has resisted the cold.  Your fingers no longer have any blood, and look white, stiff and weak, as if anaesthetised.  You need to watch out for injuries and chapped hands. The hands themselves are swollen. The watertight cuff was probably too tight, acting as a tourniquet stopping the blood from flowing back.  loosen it slightly, please. On the deck, you work on some final adjustments watching how the boat reacts.  As you are not moving, the cold appears to take over your body.  When you working hard, you coped with it. The muscles are excellent heaters, which produce four times as much heat as strength. Now that you are no longer moving, you start to shiver. These shivers are the first symptoms of the  body suffering from the cold.  by provoking uncontrollable muscular spasms, the body steps up its heat production to ward off the cold and keep you at the right temperature.

Finally, the boat is on the right course and the autopilot is set. You hurry back down below to get out of the wind. A few movements of the arms and legs to get the circulation going again.  Your feet feel like blocks of ice. The blood slowly returns to the hands. The skin is red and burning, as if the blood was finding it difficult to find its way through this epidermis turned rigid by the cold.

A nice, warm bowl of soup. The fingers are still clumsy, as you turn on the hot plate. But now it's over. The gentle heat of the flames radiates on your face and hands. It certainly feels good.  After the soup, time for a bowl of dried noodles. It's very quick and rich. Here your daily calorie intake is around 6000 calories. If the temperature falls by ten percent, you require five percent more calories.  So, if you are still hungry or haven't eaten enough, don't worry.  You are a store cupboard with all the fat that you have added so easily to your body's reserves and which people are so keen to get rid of. Yet, in fact, this age-old reflex to store fat, which has been passed down in your genes, would have saved your life in times of famine. But in modern times, where we have plenty to eat, excess is considered normal. Our genes haven't yet learnt to adapt to that.  So the 100,000 calories in our body, which represents 20% of our bodies should be sufficient to deal with that perfectly well.
Dr Jean-Yves Chauve

 

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