Transat Trials–Sleep Deprivation: The trimarans may be more extreme–faster, trickier to sail, greater possibility for a quick swim (click here to listen to winning 60-foot multihull skipper Michel Desjoyeaux interviewed after the race). But the Open 60 monohulls require ironmen. Mike Golding in Ecover is still leading the fleet, with a comfortable 38 mile lead, but the tales of exhaustion and error are starting to come out. Kiwi Mike Sanderson, who has been dueling with Golding for most of the race, just revealed that he broke a daggerboard in the 45-knot gale that blasted the fleet last Friday. Now he is half killing himself trying to keep up with Ecover, and bleeding miles to the fleet behind. Golding himself admitted “I got myself so knackered that I crashed out for quite a long time! My alarm is set for an hour, but I didn’t hear it, which meant I was sleeping through a 100 decibel car alarm for two and a half hours.” Conrad Humphreys on Hellomoto, battling for fourth, put up his largest headsail as night settled with a building wind. The next thing he remembers is waking up in his sleeping bag more than two hours later–having fallen asleep and sleepwalked his way to bed. “I had that dry, nauseous feeling in my mouth and then sheer terror hit – I ran up on deck and saw that Hellomoto was going at 28 knots boat speed with the Code 5 still up…!” In his panic to get the sail down, he dropped most of it into the water and spent another hour struggling to get it back on board. It’s impossible for anyone not out there to imagine the extremes of exhaustion these guys ar pushing themselves to. And most of them have a few more days of this before they can safely sleep the sleep of the dead…



Here’s Why They Don’t Sleep: Conrad Humphreys snaps a pic of Nick Moloney’s Skandia after 2,000 miles of racing…

(Photo: Conrad Humphreys)