“Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is J/122 Alliance… We, ve suffered catastrophic damage; the boat is sinking. There are nine souls aboard.”
If you spend any substantial amount of time on the water, you’ll hear a lot over the VHF. Swearing, squabbling, scolding…eventually, you’ll think you’ve heard it all. But there is nothing quite like hearing that haunting, ancient turn of phrase: nine souls aboard. Especially when you’re one of the nine.
The 53rd Newport Bermuda Race began auspiciously enough, with hundreds of boats—racers and spectators alike—cheerfully crowding Narragansett Bay, shouting back and forth to friends and rivals while circling the start line. Our boat, the J/122 Alliance, slipped among the throng, excited to get our racing season’s biggest offshore event underway.
A boat with an Irish harp emblem and green and orange racing stripes skirted by us, and my teammate called out to them.
“Hey, what are you drinking, Guinness or Jameson?”
“Heineken!” someone shouted back, eliciting a laugh from both crews.
We didn’t know it at the time, but by race’s end we were going to be very friendly with that boat.
Our crew of nine consisted of Alliance’s owners, person in charge Eric Irwin (60) and navigator Mary Martin (61); plus watch captains Sam Webster (30) and Connor O’Neil (31); tech expert Bill Kneller (71); chief morale officer Eddie Doherty (56); assistant navigator Julija O’Neil (33); bow assist Mary Schmitt (22); and me (29) the bow person and on-board reporter.
Six of the nine were engineers, and the majority of us had sailed more than 1,000 offshore miles together. The boat was fastidiously maintained, and we’d met regularly during the off-season to prepare for the race, complete with pop quizzes and hours worth of assigned of lectures on weather, routing, safety, and more. Though the race only requires 30% of the crew to have offshore Safety at Sea certifications, almost all of us had been through the 15-plus hours of online coursework and the in-person, hands-on training. We had every reason to believe it would be a challenging but successful race, and for the first 36 hours, that’s exactly what we had.
Though we weren’t expected to enter the