11 Jan 2018

It started with an innocuous, gentle fall. We were flaking a Yankee into its bag at the end of our refresher sal in Fremantle when I fell backwards. You know how you prop yourself up on an elbow when lying down? That’s how I landed, on my elbow; hard enough to do something to my shoulder, but not hard enough to interrupt the task in hand. Over the next few days, I found it increasingly painful to raise my arm up. Some call it painful arc, some a frozen shoulder. Tessa, our doc in the crew checked me out, it was soft tissue damage, and suggested applying ibuprofen gel which seemed to help.

The next one was a fall a couple of days out of Fremantle. I was at the back of the boat just behind the helming stations at night, and might have been helping myself to some wine gums from the packet when a wave caused a violent lurch and I went straight down landing on the back of my head on the side of the boat. OW! doesn’t quite describe it. Unfortunately, in doing so, I also knocked the same shoulder. That led to a quiet 24 hours down below, but no lasting effect.

The third episode was a day or two later when we were back on the 45. I was crossing the galley from one side to the other, holding on to the post at one side, when I missed the anti-slip strip and my feet went out from under me. I held on to the post so didn’t go crashing into the port wet locker, but gave my (same) shoulder a massive wrench. Now it was quite difficult to move around the boat and couldn’t do anything physical. Hmmmmm, deadweight, methinks.

One of the challenges I had set myself was to develop mental stamina and the ability to keep going, just as an albatross does – day in and day out; doing everything on the wing. I’m usually more of an ideas person and can see things through to conclusion, but I don’t like routine. For example, knowing my teaching timetable years forward is bad enough. But having Monday morning 3 times a day, day in and day out (watches) means you really have to get to like Mondays, and routine. Now add in a chronic injury which is with you all the time, and limits what you can do, developing the albatross is all the more challenging – going to be awesome when I get there 😳.

Now add that Beach. Deciding to carry on with a new boat was difficult as, for me, my race had finished on a beach south of Cape Town. A new crew to get to know, another skipper to fall in line with and an unknown racing potential. Keeping going had become a real challenge. The shoulder didn’t improve significantly in Sydney, but I made progress in Hobart until I threw my bag on board with the wrong hand 🙄. I also have some different anti-inflammatories which are helping now, and Airlie Beach approaches. At the very least, I need to be fit for the Pacific, properly fit for a challenging 5 weeks from Qingdao to Seattle.

Time for a proper consultation methinks.