Hero stumbles, lands dazed in city of Heroes

Hero can hear the faint, distant meowing of his cat, Kimchee. All the way from Rome - that's right, Rome - Hero listens to the mocking meow of the cat, who says, "I told you so."

Alas, Hero's quest to race the TJV has amounted to a whole lot of thunder and precious little lightning. After training and fundraising as fast and loudly as is possible, capital-H Hero has run out of sea-room and called it off. The reasons are numerous and dull and somewhat humbling, but the most resonant is that Paul and I couldn't land sufficient cash or tech sponsorship in the short time we had. It's a shame, but it was a long shot, after all. Heroic Theorem of Squirrelly Occurrence: "Everything happens for a reason, especially in squirrelly, harebrained schemes with highly unstable quantities of squirrelliness and harebrainitia." If you'll recall, this whole program was launched by a phone call from a certified lunatic named Antonio (who by the way holds the record for youngest Spaniard to solo Atlantic). But then Tony was sent to the booby-hatch. As for the Brixton toro, Paul, I'd never met him before I boarded the Polarity, and whenever I see him again will be far too soon. (There I go shooting off at the mouth).

Antonio, meanwhile, is cooking up new plans and potential future Long Shots, including the King's Cup, in which he skippered a boat last year.

So, in answer to Jeff's and Kizz's concerns, the Long Shot finds Hero in Rome, where he is recuperating. Since he has sublet his NYC apartment until December 1, he's still trying to figure out his options. If anyone has any brilliant ideas, please let me know. The truth is, Hero doesn't want to go crawling back to his hypercritical cat with his tail between his legs.

The Magic Kettle

Hero remembers vaguely the moment in Moitessier's The Long Way when the professor sermonizes about the pressure cooker at sea. Here's a Hero's elegy: It is the magic kettle. Place water and whatever the hell else you want into it -- rice, garbanzos, pieces of chicken, curry paste, tuna, a swatch of canvas -- zap it for 5 minutes after first steam and let it sit for another 4. Even if the boat is bouncing around like a cat on coals (oh, and it is! oh, yes, it is...) the cooker stays sealed. Throw it across the cabin and it stays sealed (if it hits your head, there's no guarantee your skull with stay sealed. More on that later.) It is also very gas-efficient, and ordains every dish with a mystical tastiness. The pressure cooker = magic kettle.

In other news: We worked on the assym yesterday in the mouth of the harbor, and went through the reefing system. A double-reef is the Solo's favorite configuration in force 4/5. Back at the dock I climbed the mast to replace the VHF antenna and the Winddex, and had a view right into the ladies showers along the pier. That should satisfy the desperate cries from married men for more salacious material.

In the evening I received news that one of the bigger cash sponsors we had landed had reconsidered. The rep cited Hurricane Katrina. It was a hard blow, and it gets us dangerously close to a two-year postponement. Anyway, I accept full responsibility for Katrina (part of the general law of probability, entitl'd "Mike's Law of Trans-Atlantic Occurence," stating that whenever I fly from NYC to Barcelona, something horrible happens in the States the following day: 9/11, NYC blackout, Hurricane Katrina).

Anyway, we managed to convince the TJV race committee to allow us to qualify with a Sat D+ system in stead of a Sat C. I had an offer last month from Marine Track for a Sat D+, and now they are balking. Looks like another weekend in Lisbon...

Hero on heaving deck, Polarity no longer Solo...

Hero dictates to Paul Metcalf (PM) from deck. Second Polarity training run. Past dawn, have raised big fat new mainsail with two reefs and steam at 12 knots in moderate seas. [Please keep up with difficult lingo via google.] Hero also has a sunburnt neck and a badly bruised heel. Will never unless visibly undeniable admit to seasickness. PM an odd fellow, built like a Brixton toro , says words like "crikey", thinks all Americans are from Fort Lauderdale, has crap taste in music, smells like curry. The boat is a monster, a raging monster, eats waves with aluminum teeth and breathes heavy wind. Loud and vibrating, wet and dangerous. Not so much sailboat as hellsled. 5,500 miles to go. Thank God Hero is heroic. Plan to complete crash training Thursday and depart for Cherbourg and the French flesheaters. Still await Sat C. More later.

The hero departs, an ancient city weeps...

This evening, ahora mismo, I'm finally leaving for Lisbon and the Polarity Solo. My hosts, Eric and Aurora, have been kinder than thye should have been. We have eaten many typical Catalan meals together, I have learned to conjugate five Catalan verbs and to form several sentences built around the word "cat". My only complaint is that the accomodations have been too palatial. Like Ellen MacArthur and Captain Willard, I have grown soft as flan here in Barcelona, and lost most of my tan.



The weather report on the Portuguese coast calls for a prolonged high pressure system with light winds and weather uncharacteristically felicitous for the region. Paul is going to meet me at the gas dock at Doca do Belem, in the port of Lisbon, at eight o'clock tonight, and we're off to an anchorage nearby. For the next few days, probably until Thursday. Meanwhile, we're keeping our fingers crossed that Stratos Global comes though with the Sat C, otherwise, we're going to spend our food money one and install it ourselves - which is what I suppose normal people do.

Now I'm off to the airport. Hope to post again before I depart Lisbon.

Hero falls ill, feverishly awaits turnaround

Fever-wracked and forlorn, I'm on my sickbed. Flight to Lisbon postponed at great expense until Sunday; extraordinary patience of hosts Eric and Aurora confirmed to be limitless, having last night withstood a withering Force 8 gale of complaints from Mike. This afternoon I fired off emails to both of them at their P.O.W. (Places of Work) demanding they arrange for a nurse to help me through this difficult Friday night a-bed. I even suggested they contact a young monja I met two nights ago named Azahara. Still no word.

The state of my health hardly matters. Paul and the Solo are banging into 28 knots sustained winds on the nose, still 12 hours or more out of the Cascacis and Lisbon, Portugal. The appalling conditions contradict the weather report I read from the MET UK office yesterday, but what the hell do I know about weather? I'm sloshing about in manzanilla tea and breathing vaporized medicine. Fittingly, this morning I picked up the Solo's new medical kit. Assembled quickly by a local anesthesiologist, its eclectic contents reflect a keen, albeit well-intentioned, disregard for life at sea. For instance, it includes triply-redundant treatments for gastritis and diarrhea (both of which culminate thrillingly with the deployment of "Sipositorios de Glicerina"), yet it falls well short on the matter of seasickness (one packet "Biodramina") and infections (one envelope of Antibiotica Pomade, which is precisely what it sounds like and resembles a packet of McDonald's ketchup).

This afternoon my friend Almudena dropped off a DVD of Mutiny on the Bounty. "A little something of the sea for you to watch tonight, Miguelito." I find her humor vexing.

Rumors from a world I never knew

Because nobody really reads this thing, and few who do really give a crap about open ocean racing, and because I don't know a soul in this race, not a soul - for all of these reasons I feel it's my duty to spread as much toxic, offensive, yet clearly very possibly true gossip as I can about the other racers. This afternoon I had lunch with a Spanish skipper, who told me this: Frenchies Anne Liardet and Karen Leibovici got into a shouting and shoving match during their 1,000 mile qualifier on the Open 60 Roxy II and consequently hate each other and barely even finished the run around Fastnet Rock and when they got back to Normandy Anne fired her and now difficult Karen is without a boat and pushy Anne is without a co-skipper.

Yikes! Tough break, ladies!

And! And, Ellen MacArthur, it is rumored, never really recovered from her circumnavigation, and those around her are worried that she's not mentally fit for solo racing. MacArthur is sharpening her blades and doing a drunken-and-bleeding- Captain-Willard-in-Saigon dance at her hotel in New York City, awaiting the right storm pattern to blow her and her 75-foot abomination clear across to England. If you're interested in taking any action on when precisely E-to-McA jumps off her journey into the heart of a terrible darkness, please email me at mike.guy@gmail.com.

I don't mean to pick on the female skippers. It's just that they're all rich and scary, as well as emasculating and castrating, etc. Except for Servane Escoffier, who is just a peach. (Those interested in gossip etc. about Servane please refer to my other, bluer blog.)

The Polarity Solo, 320 miles from Lisbon

A wicked wind blows

Paul is 350 nautical miles out of Lisbon. This afternoon he popped the assymetrical spinnaker to catch a freshening easterly. It all seems quite fucking felicitous. Meanwhile, here at Camp Polarity HQ, I have caught the sniffles, which appear to be freshening into a force 5 cold. This morning I biked to a yacht supply company in Port Vell purchase a winch handle, and choked on scooter smoke all the way back. Can't wait to get to Lisbon and take the Biscay punishment I so justly deserve. Considering his revised arrival time, it appears as though I may have to sleep on the docks in Lisbon tomorrow until the boat arrives. Lovely...

I love you, Ellen MacArthur!

Do you know Ellen MacArthur? She is the most famous sailor in the world. She is very small of stature, but has a thick trunk and great big forearms and paws that give her the aspect of an elegant jackhammer, swaddled in Henri Lloyd. She was the star of the 04 Vendee, and will be the star of this year's TJV. She is a veritable vacuum cleaner of corporate sponsorship. I envy and loathe her so much that she now makes appearances in most of my most recent dreams. (When I say 'dreams', I mean edgy anxiety nightmares, which are what I now have. In last night's edition, Paul and I deployed an emergency sea parachute in the Biscay, and it kept lifting out of the water and catching the gale force winds. Ellen, meanwhile, cackled in the background. She is in New York City right now - where I live - waiting for the right weather to blow her and her obscenely fast B&Q trimaran to break Joyon's Transatlantic record. She may be sweet and successful and popular with Richies and the Rest of the World, and she may have never done anything to slight me in the least, but I loathe Ellen MacArthur.

Servane Escoffier is another TJV competitor (as are, apparently, most of her family). She is co-skippering a Class 2 Multihull, and I have no loathing for her, despite her being French. In fact, I think she's sort of cute, and am considering asking her out on a date before the race. Keep your enemies closer...

God lives in the Bay of Biscay

Friday, I'm getting a reheading

Despite the numerous unanswered sponsor questions and the annoying foot dragging of one Sat C company, I'm finally booked to fly to Lisbon to meet up with Polarity on Friday. The added week plus of fundraising stasis here in Barcelona has eaten through my cash reserves. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to unravel a long list of tech issues that, frankly (and don't tell anyone), I only sort of understand: tech sponsors for a battery management system, for VHF handhelds and an upgraded SSB, spare autopilots, a rig reheading, more nav equipment from Garmin and Silva. I'm also attempting to wrangle a free stability survey for the boat after we reach Cherbourg. i spoke with a Sir Ian Collett, of Ward & MacKenzie in London about this. He is a knight. When I said, "Cool," about a scheduling accomodation, he said, "Wot?" finally, I'm still and always after cash sponsors to help out with the millions of sundried, from a new genoa and assym to food, so that we don't end up eating French dirt and bread scraps for the month of October.

If let him choke, he would like me more...

Here's my favorite irony thus far: The rarefied, cash-oodled, large-bucketed world of ocean racing runs mostly on donations and the generosity of others. My leverage is my meager charm, my ample hair, not much else. But no matter how compelling my pitch, or how fine the finer selling points - an aggregate 800,000 people will gaze upon the logos on our boat, including 200,000 or more on start day - a company's decision to donate cash or equipment is determined as much or more by emotion than by numbers.

The day after I arrived in Barcelona I met with a creaky old fellow named John Audabran. He is French, but quite sweet nonetheless, and when we sat at the table at the Royal Boat Club, the other club members called out to him warmly. Audabran is the principal of a new marina in Barcelona, called Port Forum, and I'm trying my damnedest to sell the space on Polarity's boom to him. Before our food arrived, Audabran swilled vermouth cassis ("a taxi driver's drink," he said), and when he choked mildly on a mussel I patted his back. Charm in action: a pat and a wink. Sales is not my strong point (that would be sailing: sailing is my strong point).

At the end of the lunch, he walked unsteadily to his Smart Car. It's hard to tell if I had found the proper emotional response. Shit, I might have saved his life when he choked on that mussel, but he was more embarrassed than grateful.

Polarity's whereabouts

Paul called me today from Polarity's deck. After three days beating into a Force 5 headwind he laid into an anchorage at Cabo de Gatos. Winds remain over 25 knots from the southwest.

Mal de mer, and other French problems

Last year, on a delivery up the Gulf Stream, my uncle Dave got very seasick. We were delivering my father's beautiful new Pearson 424 ketch, Ranger, to its new home in New Hampshire, and we rode some hard road. After a day or two on a frightening, confused twenty-foot following sea, Dave's tummy let loose, and he divided with rest of our time on the Stream expurgating over the rail and folded up in a wretched, waif-like state down below. It was difficult to watch. The only remedy - going ashore and walking it off - was not feasibel. Or possible. And while I'm quite sure Dave's not too thrilled I'm writing about it here, he'd likely agree it's an exceedingly unpleasant state in which to travel: offshore, in dizzying and noisy seas and irredeemably, hideously nauseous.

This afternoon, to celebrate Cataluna's loss to the army hordes from Madrid on September 11, 1714, my hosts brought me and Aurora's father, Amadeu, to hunt for porcini mushrooms in the mountains outside Barcelona. I sat in the back seat as our tiny VW threaded up the Montseny mountain roads. We were talking about Cataluna's bad luck and the new meaning of 9/11 in the US, when I felt a touch of nausea. Slight, creeping. We passed a car pulled over and a little boy was wretching into a bush, his mother patting his back. Before long, we were safely in the beech groves combing through leaves for porcinis, and the nausea had passed. But the image of my uncle and that poor little boy stayed with me: what happens if I get sick in the middle of a 4,500 mile, double-handed race?

In preparation for this race, I've studied seasickness, read countless accounts of how, who and why. In reality it's a crapshoot. My father has never been seasick in his life. He can sit in the wooziest rollers out there and slurp oysters without whiffif of ill-effects. Seasickness is most prevalent in juveniles, and among adults females are more at risk. Interestingly, people in good physical shape are more prone to it then their porky peers, though I've yet to read a convincing reason why. Obviously, people who spend more time at sea are more accustomed to the uneven motion believed to cause seasickness - how many times have you seen a lobsterman leaning over his transom and wretching? But in many popular accounts of open-ocean passages, this doesn't hold true: In Close to the Wind, Pete Goss's excellent account of his solo circumnavigation in the 1996 Vendee Globe, the former Royal Marine writes of battling through seasickness for the first few days of the race. Hard-boiled French sailing demigod Bernard Moitessier, who may well have had gills, wrote of experiencing mal de mer in his classic, The Long Way.

So obviously, I'm looking into prevention and remedy. During the Ranger delivery my brother Conor and I wore the Scopalomine patch, and neither of us had a problem. People swear by the old standby, Dramamine; and my brother Tim - the real sailor of the family - uses Bonine. People also swear by ginger, gin and tonic, and a hard-to-find wonder drug called Stugeron. Any other recommendations?

Wheeling and dealing

I'm in Barcelona now, staying at the house of my very kind friends, Aurora and Eric. Ironically, success in the rarified world of professional deep-ocean racing seems to rely completely on the generosity of others. (More later on the subject of sailing and ironic abjection.) Paul has started sailing the Polarity Solo down the Spanish coast to our qualifying staging ground in Lisbon, and I'm hanging back here in B-town meeting with prospective sponsors - a marina called Port Forum, a champagne company called Codoniu, an athletic socks manufacturer (!), and a swank new UK-based internet music channel called Music Choice. (More later on my new life as a whore.) Primarily what I'm waiting for is news about the status of sponsorship for an Inmarsat C global tracking system, without which the TJV Race Committee won't allow us to begin the qualifier - a 1,000 mile run across the Bay of Biscay, nearly to the coast of Ireland, and then eastward to Cherbourg, France.

So I'm in a holding pattern until these loose ends are tied up. (If anyone knows how to get their hands on a cheap Sat C / GPS system, or knows of an Inmarsat dealer looking to get rid of one for cheap, please please please let me know: mike.guy@gmail.com.)

A slight change in plans

Brooklyn, NY - I'm not going to cover every detail of the past two months. However, for the purposes of my story, I will say this: Antonio is certifiable. He and I exchanged dozens of emails about our plans for the race - acquiring the boat, the sponsorships to equip it, the training schedule on the French coast. Then suddenly, in August, he stopped responding to my emails. He had been staying at the estate of our main sponsor, a jewelry manufacturer from Monaco, when he started to lose grip on reality. He had intended to crew on a brand new Open 60 in the Rolex Fastnet Race, but the Jeweler said he was mentally unfit, and withdrew his name. It turns out that Antonio's family has a history of adult-onset schizophrenia.

I received an email from him after repeated entreaties by internet and phone, and he finally wrote me a strange missive - about magic keys, protective honey, gypsy camps across the river, a powerful waterwheel from which he draws power.

His father flew to retreive him, and he's since been diagnosed and treated in Barcelona. Because I'm a lucky sonuvabitch, and tenacious when I want to be, I secured a co-skipper spot on the Polarity Solo, captained by a nice fellah name Paul Metcalf. It didn't occur to me until a few days later that I had been recruited enter a race for which I'm just slightly underqualified by a madman. So what does that make me?