The Hips of an 84-year old
Day 13 : Ascension Island to Azores
Wednesday, March 30th 2022
Some people say I take after my Dad.
The kind ones talk about our shared sense of humour, our similar mannerisms, our entrepreneurial mindset, or even our mutual love of strong women.
Those who are less kind will point to a certain similarity of hair and waist lines.
What we’ve never had in common, so far as I’m aware, is the state of our hips.
Until now.
The perceived wisdom about a good boat for offshore cruising is that it should have lots of hand holds in the interior, to better enable you to move around while the boat is bouncing around at a steep angle.
But blue water sailing legend & author John Kretschmer shared a smarter version of this with us a few years ago, based on his having sailed over 200,000 ocean miles in close to 100 boats as a delivery skipper. “It’s not hand holds you should be looking for, it’s hip holds”, he told us.
And as soon as he said it, we knew he was right. When you’re trying to get from the cockpit to the galley, and then to your cabin, and the boat is at a lean of 20 degrees, and falling off of 3 metre waves, each and every step needs to be deliberate, and planned in advance.
What might take 4 seconds when you’re in the anchorage, can easily take 20 or 30 seconds as you take one step, pause, wait for the boat to roll back the other way, so you can use gravity to help with the next step, and so on.
In those circumstances, hand holds can be really helpful – the goal is to keep one hand on the prior hand hold, as you reach out for the next one, coinciding with your step.
Which is all well and good if you typically walk your way from one end of the boat to the other and back again empty handed.
But who does that?
What you’re typically doing is taking the lunch dishes down from the cockpit to the galley. Then filling up your water bottle, then going through to your cabin, then realising that you left your phone back in the cockpit and having to go back for that. Then, “while you’re up”, just grabbing a book from the cabin and bringing it back to your significant other who’s sitting comfortably in the cockpit, all the while muttering sweet nothings about how happy you are to help.
Under those circumstances, trying to use handholds one handed is going to end in tears. Rapidly. And this is when hip holds prove their worth.
If your boat is well designed for this purpose, and Steely is, there’s always a hip hold a step away. So as you plan each step, you’re looking for the next handhold with your one free hand, to swing you towards somewhere where you can rest your hip, on the low side of the boat, allowing gravity to hold you in place while you prepare for the next step and the next hand hold.
Hand, hip, hand, hip, lurch, “F*CK”, “Bugger”, hand, hip. So goes the Steely dance from one end of the boat to the other.
Sometimes, if you’re feeling really brave, or just lazy and don’t want to make two trips, you might try and make one such trip holding stuff in BOTH hands, relying entirely on your hips for support along the way.
That is do-able, but it comes at a cost. And so as I woke this morning to go on watch, and tried to crawl out of bed, I found I could barely move. My hips were bruised, and seized up, and desperately wanted to know if we were nearly there yet.
And as I grabbed my water bottle and phone and made my way to the cockpit at half of my usual slow pace, I thought of my Dad (one hip replacement done, the other long deferred) and thought of how proud he’d be that I’m taking after him in yet another way.
Day 13 Statistics:
Time on passage so far: 12 days, 21 hours
Distance covered in last 24 hours: 117 nm
Average Speed in last 24 hours: 4.9 knots
Official Length of intended Route when we set out: 3,480 nm
Current Projected Distance to Go according to chart plotter: 1,857 nm
Distance Sailed so Far: 1,540 nm
Total Projected Distance of Route: (1,857 + 1,540) 3,397 nm
Change in total projected distance in last 24 hours: +3 miles.
Number of hand hip shuffles around the boat on day 13: 24
