Volvo Ocean Race - Long cold shower

by Team Brunel - Robbert-Jan Metselaar on 27 Mar 2015 Volvo Ocean Race - How many people do you know who have enjoyed a four hour long cold shower? Normal people don't do that, unless they have masochist tendencies. The water temperature in the Southern Ocean has dropped to around eight degrees by now, so the spray which thunders over the deck is absolutely freezing. And because the boat builders felt the need to save on insulation and a heater, the entire hull feels like a block of ice. A sailing fridge as it were. Some people cope better than others. So who are the two biggest shiverers on board Team Brunel?

2) Pablo Arrarte: The cheerful Spaniard doesn't belong in the Southern Ocean. Would you take a cockatoo to the South Pole? While pulling on his sailing gear, Pablo fantasises out loud about the weather at home in his Santander paradise. His imagination slowly slips away to the beautiful seaside resort where his tanned toes wiggle in the Spanish sand. The reality is that within five minutes, those same toes need to be forced into freezing boots, one of which has sprung a leak. Pablo wears the same gloves as the fishermen in the Deadliest Catch Discovery series. He gets up fifteen minutes earlier in able to put them on in time. When Pablo gets hit by a wave, the look on his face resembles that of a kitten whose owner has decided that it needs a bath. It's a mixture of 'blind panic' and 'what the .....'.

1) Bouwe Bekking: The man who sailed the Whitbread Round the World Races before the greenhouse effect or ice-gates became terms in the dictionary. He first sailed around Cape Horn as co-skipper at the age of 21. 'We were sailing at 62 degrees South. Think in terms of icicles on the railing and penguins sitting on the chunks of floating ice. Back in the days when the sailors were proper men,' the skipper jokingly regales his younger colleagues. There is no knowledge of whether his crew knew him to be the 'shiverer' back then. Bouwe's nomination had been waiting to happen for a while, ever since his appearance in a balaclava in the tropics. It therefore came as no surprise that six of the nine crew members nominated their skipper.

And if Napoleon's troops had worn Bouwe's boots on their Russian campaign, French would have been the language spoken in Russia nowadays. They're hunting boots from Lapland. The skipper disappears into his sleeping bag wearing those gigantic boots, six layers of thermal underwear and his sailing gear, and soon produces a quiet snoring noise. Colleague Jens Dolmer has his doubts about his freedom of movement in so many layers of clothes. The Dane playfully refers to his skipper as the Michelin man. 'It's the other way around, I'm not the shiverer. Do you ever hear me complain? I'm as warm as toast, simply because I wear so many layers.'

Iceman

So who's the man who likes it as cold as possible? In a direct duel for the Iceman award, Jens Dolmer is pipped at the post by the Lithuanian Rokas Milevicius. The man with the mineral wool skin. Or maybe it's his warm nature that helps him through these icy conditions seemingly without effort. Rokas nips out for a pee on the rear deck in his undies every morning. His colleagues reckon his Siberian roots give him a biological advantage. Although his parents did indeed spend time in a penal camp there, he can still appreciate the joke. After all, he's won the first award of the season.