What nobody told us about attending the stopover was that the Volvo Ocean Race sailors were just casually walking around the Race Village, mixed in with the crowds, and pretty much always willing to stop for photos with people.
It was incredible, you guys.
– Sophie Ciszek, at Pit Row, just after returning from the practice racing around the harbor on Thursday.
– Xabi Fernandez, same.
– Blair Tuke, I told him I had an online friend whose real name I didn’t know (@foreveralonewithfiftyyachts) from the same part of New Zealand who saw him as an inspiration and that both of us wanted to thank him for everything he’s done. So now he knows you exist, I guess.
– Okay, so this is kind of embarassing, but on Thursday after the practice racing, Turn The Tide On Plastic was docked at a slip on the opposite side of the Pit Row from all of the other boats, next to the dock that the water taxi from elsewhere in Newport was coming in at, so there weren’t as many people gathered to watch/cheer for them. I went to the end of the dock to watch and I shouted “AW YEAH TTOP!” and some of the sailors turned their heads to look. Dee Caffari actually looked up and said “What?”, so then I was really embarrassed and said, in more of a normal voice, “GO TTOP!”
So then the next day, when we were touring the Boatyard as part of the Race Village Experience, we saw Liz Wardley and when I asked if we could take a picture, she said “You’re the one who was shouting.” But she wasn’t annoyed and she liked that I liked the team and her videos of Wisdom. She said she would have to make more!
– Then when we saw Dee Caffari, she also said “You were yelling yesterday.” She was fine with it, too, and was glad that I was a fan.
– Bouwe Bekking, this whole set were right before the Sailors’ Parade on Saturday before the In-Port Race, so there were a lot of people who wanted pictures and I didn’t get to talk as much. But they were all still really nice.
– Kyle Langford, I said I had seen him at the America’s Cup World Series New York and he said it was a great event. Unfortunately, the person who took the picture of us caught me with this stupid expression on my face.
– Another awkward pic, I clicked the button right when Pascal Bidégorry blinked and didn’t realize until later.
– David Witt, who called his companion “the infamous” Andrew Cape.
– Martine Grael, I tried explaining “My Dad doesn’t know anything about sailing, but when he watches the videos of the arrivals, he says that your Dad and you remind him of when I come home from college so our family is rooting for you” but I was starstruck and in a hurry because of everyone else, so I think it came out sounding kind of jumbled and she may not have understood. Sorry if I seemed weird.
– Charlie Enright, who was probably pretty tired of taking pics by this point in the stopover.
– Peter Burling, just before the Sailors’ Parade for the departure. I was actually just walking around thinking “The only person I follow closely I haven’t met yet is…” right before this, so of course I went over.
(And yes, I am very short and they are all very tall.)
This entry was posted by jbc on Saturday, May 4th, 2019 at 6:13 am and is filed under Tumblr.
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