Andrew Campbell's training in Foggy Qingdao

by Andrew Campbell on 21 Jun 2008 'No buddha, no boatracing' was our basic rule to decide whether to go out training on a given day.

There is a fifty-foot tall gold statue protecting the harbor entrance about 200 yards from our container-basecamp in the boatpark. If it’s blanketed by fog, that’s usually the best indicator that it will be too difficult to see anything to be useful on the water, and if it’s clear enough to see then we might be able to see the other end of the starting line or maybe even the windward mark. The pea-soup fog has been the dominant weather factor of the sailing so far.

Yesterday we had a good practice session going until the fog rolled in so thick we couldn’t see the marks at a range of 100 yards. The US Star fleet of three boats and two coachboats ghosted past us yesterday at about a tenth of a mile and never knew we were there. The only reason we knew they were there was because all of a sudden we had a waft of very bad air and wake. We get back in via compass angles, GPS, and blind faith on a daily basis.We’ve had breeze in the light air range to be sure.

Its been three to six knots with rarely a puff that would make us wish we had our hiking pads on. Its actually quite an interesting mix between San Diego’s morning light air, swell and kelp with the Potomac River’s tidal current and dirty water.

Perhaps the biggest oddity here is the massive paddies of algae floating across the racecourses and the fleet of harvesters hired to clear it up. Very thin and gooey seaweed is the only form of life we can detect in the water in off the YinHai Yacht Club where we are training.

Every day a rally of Chinese junk-style fishing boats lines up out in front of the club and then disperses across the racing areas to clear the waters of the great blobs of algae. It is a bit of nuisance while we are sailing having to dodge the globs that can sometimes grow to be the size of a baseball diamond. They generally form in the lines between different current.

Yesterday I saw a British laser sailor try and navigate his way through one of the blobs, but before he stopped dead in the water. Before he could get out of its green grips he had to pull his centerboard up and scull downwind out of the enveloping goo. It seems to us a futile effort, but apparently the entire fishing fleet of Qingdao has been hired out to harvest the algae and pull it out of the water and offload it into waiting tractor-trailers that standby just adjacent to our training site bound for some undisclosed location.

Qingdao Fishermen

I use the term 'rally' when refering to the fleet of Chinese fisherman because they sound like a gang of Hells Angels coasting past in the fog, their V-8 muffler-less engines popping and sputtering loud enough to make any hard core biker dude jealous. It is a curious sight to see these fishermen come out of the fog, laden with a huge mound of seaweed on their ancient wooden craft. I’m sure we’re as odd to them in our colorful inflatable ribcrafts and sleek racing sailboats. Our only point of commonality is our complete lack of understanding for how each other lives. More to come from Qingdao

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