Slowly sinking in

Three weeks after finishing the Faraday Mill OSTAR, Lia Ditton pauses to reflect on her arrival

Been wondering what Lia Ditton has been up to since the finish of the OSTAR? Well, after a short recovery period, she has been straight back out to sea again, most recently delivering the 40ft Antrim-designed trimaran Zephyr up the East Coast of America and back into Newport again.

Meanwhile Lia currently is planning to sail Shockwave back across the Atlantic on her own again, but most probably using a few more stops along the way this time. More info will emerge soon. She has written a round up of the events following her arrival, which is up to her normal descriptive standards:
 
21 days have passed since I stormed into Newport, Rhode Island aboard Shockwave, the 35ft Shuttleworth trimaran that I chartered for the Faraday Mill OSTAR 2005. It has taken me until now to turn to my thoughts to the challenge of sailing her home and to sailing her home alone.
 
It is a wonderfully wicked feeling to be ripping along on a multihull while one's monohull counterpart is left comparatively standing still. 'So long, farewell, aufwiedersehn, goodbye...' escapes one's lips inadvertently in a tone of mock regret. If  Zeal was sailing in the tempo andante, Shockwave, was a more vivacious, allegro, as we passed each other off Nantucket shoals in the final straits. If there were two vessels I potentially could have hit during the Faraday Mill OSTAR, it was fellow competitors aboard Atlantic Express and Zeal who were both at times of encounter on a reciprocal course. The irony
of course being that the $2,000,000 Third Party insurance which is an entry requirement into such a race, does not cover incidences of collision with other race entrants! In any case, passing Peter Zieg at 16 knots, while weaving through the field of lobster pots and with an arrival time pitched at some four hours after, only caused to add to my already building excitement.

I have thought of many analogies since, but the sensation of arriving in Newport after close to a month of sailing solo can only best be described as leaving solitary confinement for a rock concert. Being a Saturday afternoon, the hottest recorded day of the year so far and the end of Block Island Race Week, meant that the channel into Narragansett bay was surprisingly full of traffic. I had pictured myself crossing the finish with perhaps a modest couple of spectator RIBs and maybe a scattering of friends waving cocktails from the lawn of Castle Hill [Hotel], not dodging cruising vessels, power boaters and the odd day charter of a classic America's Cup boat. But had you been looking out for Lia's Shockwave, the half a foot of algae growing up the side of all three hulls would soon have pointed out the boat, just as the grin which spanned one ear to the other would have given away its skipper. 
 
As I anticipated, we had to winch the entire mainsail down. The top four track cars had split, but amazingly held to the end. The jib had to be furled by hand and the outboard of course, refused to start first time, so it was under tow fore and aft that I arrived at the dock of the Newport Yacht Club. An amazing number of friends who I had not seen for at least a year or two were standing, waiting, watching bemused. My old friend Dani was shaking his head annunciating each word in a rhetorical fashion- 'Lea-ar,  What - what - were - you - thinking?!' If I had said it to Craig Alexander when I first set eyes on 50ft trimaran legend Moxie [Phil Weld's trimaran winner of the 1980 OSTAR], the small crowd gathered on the dock were clearly thinking the same. "You did what? You raced from where? In that....?!"

I couldn't even begin to answer the question, 'How was it?' How does one summarise 28 days and 27 nights into one, tangible line with more complexity than simply, 'It was wet?' 'It was wet!' seemed to satisfy for now. Certainly one couldn't argue with that. In the meantime there was champagne to drink! It was quickly evident that I have had little [I.e no] practise in my life at spraying champagne. Equally visible was an internal struggle between wanting to improve my champagne-spraying technique and the thought, but 'That's good champagne you're wasting!' Luckily there seemed an endless string of bottles to go round.
 
THE SHOWER not only deserves capitals but an entire paragraph to itself. It was with a small backpack of clothes [one set] and a bag of cleaning products [shower gel, shampoo, conditioner] with which I was dispatched to the Yacht Club shower before the Sponsors party. The choice of clothing was an entertaining assortment of my favourite T-shirt [picturing an artwork in the Saatchi Collection by Jake and Dinos Chapman], my only skirt, somewhat autumnal in corduroy brown, my long distance running shoes [flat soled red and silver Nikes] and my Raymarine burgundy fleece cardigan. I have no idea how long I was in the shower for, but it took several rinses to get all the salt out of my hair, before I could even begin to enjoy the fragrance and suddsy-feeling of each of the 'beauty' products that I had lined up in turn.
   
Until Friday the following week, I can in retrospect, say I was flying high. Laughter bubbled out of my lips. Everything was fun and refreshingly different. I had moved on from feeling sleepy every few hours, into a socially acceptable pattern. Food I continued to demolish for a good two weeks after - chips, donuts, fizzy drinks, cornflakes, real milk, chicken pizza, asparagus, anything I could lay my hands on, like I was discovering the cuisine of a new continent and had to try everything anew. Over pancakes we bade James, my carbon wizard friend adieu, it was back to England for him; there were wind turbines to build. And so the party seemed to draw to a close.

'With miles to go before I sleep, with miles to go before I sleep...' I couldn't keep my
eyes open and spent the ensuing few days more awake asleep; in a dreamy state, somewhere outside Boston.
 
Sitting on a small wooden bench outside David Steele's house in Grafton, I wrote my article for Yachting World. [Look out for it in the September Issue]. It was muggy inside. Underneath the eave of the house, I revelled in the feeling of dryness, as the rain fell down around me arousing the fresh smell of wet grass. His garden was a lush green, with the leaves undulating, in a slow motion, the droplets rolling from one leaf down to another. If I could have imagined an antidote to a month of sullen blues and grey skies, the shock of green around me served well as a tonic. I finally felt fit to turn my thoughts back to Shockwave and the journey home.

With the crack around the mast base wavered as superficial damage, and a surveyor giving the Lia-epoxied daggerboard case, the thumbs up, we waited solely on the furler parts [kindly supplied under warrantee] and pondered what to do with the jib. When I stretched it out on the floor of North Sails, the service manager turned to me and asked, 'Would you like us to dispose of that for you?!' I reeled back in horror. 'No! You have to fix that!' My days of lugging 3DLs to the loft for repair had faded from memory; the world of the American 18-man crewed racing machine being a world apart: Buy a new one - someone else's footing the bill! Thankfully Doyle at Marblehead took it under their wing and recycling the material as much as possible, offered a reasonable repair price.
 
The bizarre American holiday - July 4th [I always picture Will Smith hurling his watch off the top of the skyscraper in the movie, 'Independence Day'] came and went with a bang of fireworks and a foray of National drinking, hotdogs and candy floss. 'Ah! The day when England gave America back,' I like to joke when I get the annual explanation of the holiday in question. You have to love the patriotism of The United States of America. But it was Peter Zieg's comment about the transatlantic crossing west to east, which was nagging on my mind on this day. "It gives you a sense of completion..." he was saying.

With the only price to ship Shockwave, back as deck cargo, coming back at an astounding $17,500, I had up until that point held out a great deal of hope of craning her away. Perhaps I could ride on the freighter and watch over my charge, I fantasised. "Unless you want to pay the premium, forget-it", a French Canadian down for the Marblehead to Halifax race, advised me over a Dark and Stormy in the 'Sail Loft' bar, Marblehead. The realisation that Shockwave, was only going to leave the shores of the US under sail, with the second Dark and Stormy, finally sank in.
 
Ralph Marx, the owner of ' Shockwave 'had hoped to enjoy the ride, but alas had other commitments. Abraham [my shore crew assistant] and I talked of his solo return or a father-son duet, all of which were possibilities attractive enough to all involved.  If the drive towards the Faraday Mill OSTAR 2005 had started alone in December 2003, unrelenting through the love and loss of three boats and the toil of many an interested sponsor in between, then taking the helm of Shockwave, for the last time back to England, it needed to be me, Aurelia 'Lia' Ditton, albeit alone.  
 


Lia Ditton is a young enthusiastic professional yachtswoman bringing fresh new ideas to the world of sailing with her unique intergration of Art to the sport.

Lia is currently studying Sculpture at the Prestigious Chelsea College of Art & Design in London.

After the race Shockwave will be painted with a special thermochromatic heat sensitive paint & exhibited outside Tate Britain in the centre of London.