Temporal Dysphoria in the Jules Verne

On Friday, we told the story of Francis Joyon’s IDEC Sport maxi trimaran setting a record for the Indian Ocean crossing from from Cape Agulhas in South Africa to Cape Leeuwin in southwest Australia. Over the weekend, the larger Spindrift 2 also set an Indian Ocean record. Both teams are simultaneously attempting to break the Jules Verne Trophy circumnavigation record.

By crossing the longitude of South East Cape, the southernmost tip of Tasmania, at 8:39 GMT on Saturday, December 12, the 130-ft Spindrift 2 set a new best time for crossing the Indian Ocean from Cape Agulhas to Tasmania of 8 days 4 hours and 35 minutes, but more importantly for the passage between the start at Ushant and the entrance of the Pacific: 20 days, 4 hours and 37 minutes, which is 2 hours and 34 minutes better than the current holder of the Jules Verne Trophy, Loïck Peyron.

"Don’t ask me what time it is," said Swiss helmswoman Dona Bertarelli yesterday. "I’ve got no idea. I don’t even know whether it’s morning, afternoon or evening. On board we use UTC, also known as GMT. Does that help? Not really — it makes it all the more confusing! Just to give you an idea, daybreak is at 6:30 p.m. and nightfall at 1 p.m. But it gets worse. Lunch is at 4 in the morning, and our evening meal is at midday! That should give you an idea of the chaos, but there’s more — all these times shift by an an hour and a half every day.

"So I just eat when I’m told to eat, without asking too many questions, but when I woke up this morning I didn’t really enjoy having paella for breakfast. Things will get even more complicated over the next two days, when we’ll go through the same day twice. Just after New Zealand we’ll cross the International Date Line, so one minute it will be midnight on December 15th, and the next it will be midnight on December 14th. It’s crazy, but that’s how Phileas Fogg, thinking he’d lost his bet, discovered that actually he had successfully travelled around the world in 80 days."

Eating and cooking on Spindrift 2 requires great coordination: In the Southern Ocean it takes 50 minutes to heat up six liters of water and then 45 minutes for rehydration of dehydrated meals, which comes to about one and a half hours of preparation.

Spindrift 2 is now on the return journey having crossed the International Date Line today, literally on the other side of the world from the start of the circumnavigation. So Bertarelli, skipper Yann Guichard, and their crew are now enjoying their second 14th of December.

IDEC Sport also crossed the International Date Line today, re-entering the Western Hemisphere in dense mist, while still traveling at more than 30 knots.

Update: To view all three boats (Spindrift 2, IDEC Sport, and the record holder, Banque Populaire V) on one tracker, see volodiaja.net/Tracking.