Chichester Yacht Club Magazine April 2018 | Page 28

Winter Lecture, 11th March 2018 – Caroline Bowen “Clipper Race”
- by John Lake
For the “average” Chichester Yacht Club
member, the height of our sailing ambition
might be to get out of the Solent for a few
weeks in the summer – maybe to go on the
RC’s Cruise to Brittany or join the West
Country Cruise. But maybe, we all secretly (or
not so secretly) really hope that it is not yet too
late to embark on that trip across the Atlantic,
or even to carry on cruising around the world!
Our Sunday speaker – Caroline Bowen –
actually stepped up to the challenge a few
years’ ago, and signed on for a Round the
World trip with Sir Robin Knox-Johnson’s
Clipper Race.
Caroline is a local, a member of Bosham
Yacht Club, where her family introduced her to
sailing very young. By the age of eight she
was at Sea School, going on to attend 11
years’ worth of Bosham Junior Weeks;
continued her interest through university at
Edinburgh and as an Oxford Blue and
attended the 2005 World Championships in
the Yngling Class.
All this made Caroline a very atypical
participant in the Clipper Round the World
Race, where the majority of people are new to
sailing. Indeed, preparation for this 40,000
mile, 11-month event consisted of just a week
of training for each of the following: crew skills;
offshore sailing; spinnaker handling; and finally
team tactics and fleet racing.
Around 400 people sign up for each Clipper
Race, to be one of a crew of between 14 and
22 on one of 12 (now 11 – more later) yachts
racing on a multi-leg ocean race. Not everyone
signs on to be a “worlder”; some just for a
single leg, but Caroline was there for the whole
race – on “Qingdao” sponsored by the Chinese
city of that name.
Caroline outlined the features and challenges
of each of the “legs” in turn. The first leg from
London to Rio notable for reasonably benign
weather and a single tack lasting 2000 miles!
Her sister was on another Clipper boat and
after 1,000 miles, they passed within three
boat lengths of each other.
Even before the start of Leg 2
Rio to Capetown, some of the
hazards of ocean racing
became evident: another boat
(Elmax) had run aground and
Qingdao was sent to assist. But
she too ended up beached,
before being re-floated and
taken to a local marina for
repairs. Was it a measure of the
strength of these yachts that this
pair was delayed by only 3 or 4
days before setting off to
Capetown? But after Capetown,
yet again Elmax ended up on a
reef, which finally wrote her off.
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