One-hour naps, powdered food and a bucket toilet – Inside The Ocean Race with Annie Lush

Hauling yourself above deck after an hour of broken sleep. Meals that consist exclusively of powder stirred with hot water. Going to the toilet in a bucket, trying to avoid awkwardly locking eyes with a team-mate barely a metre away. All while being battered by the elements in some of the most hostile environments on the planet.

One question quickly springs to mind: why?

But for Britain’s Annie Lush, and the other brave souls set to battle it out for almost six months in the latest edition of The Ocean Race, it is a routine she has made peace with.

“It’s super long, it’s relentless,” she tells Eurosport from inside a shipping container, part of her team’s base in Alicante, Spain, ahead of the first leg.

“The thing that makes it stand apart from any other event is that most very long endurance events are solo. I can’t really think of another sporting event that is quite so hard with a team. It’s six months of intensity with a team, stuck in a very small space in very extreme parts of the planet. It’s the ultimate test.”

Each team in the top-tier IMOCA class, featuring Lush’s GUYOT environment – Team Europe, will cover some 23,000 nautical miles across seven legs around the globe in one of the most demanding tests in sport.

In her previous two outings in The Ocean Race, Lush competed with crews of 11 sailors (2014-15) and nine (2017-18).

But in 2023, she will be part of a slimline four-strong team, plus a media reporter, due to the evolution in the boats that now foil. Foiling, for the uninitiated, is where the boat lifts out of the water – “it’s more of an aircraft than a boat sometimes”, says Lush – meaning the crew need to be as lightweight as possible.

“I think when people think of sailing they’re like: ‘yeah, yeah, you’re sitting there with your gin and tonic!’ It’s not quite like that…” says Lush, who competed for Team GB at the 2012 Olympics before switching to endurance sailing.

“The main thing is the boat’s got to keep racing the whole time so there’s no stopping and going to sleep.”

With so few crew members comes a regimented rotation, typically meaning three hours on deck and 90 minutes ‘off’ below deck. A navigator, the fourth crew member, usually sits outside of the rotation.

“Ninety minutes off doesn’t mean 90 minutes in your bunk,” continues Lush. “It means 90 minutes that you can be below deck, which means you also need to eat, perhaps you need to repair something, everyone has other roles as well as sailing the boat – whether it’s medical, or the sails, or the rigging, or sorting out the food.”

“Below deck” is a kind description for what is effectively a small open space where you are unable to stand and are often forced to crawl around to avoid being thrown off your feet by a rogue wave or gust. The kitchen is basically a kettle on the wall. And the food? Well, it’s certainly not cruise ship quality.

“Our food is only freeze dried, it’s like astronaut food,” says Lush.

“Now there’s a nice [freeze dried] option which is soft food that the army use… and then there’s the one we use which is even lighter and is just powder. It’s more like pot noodle shrink-wrapped, you add hot water and it makes it into food.”

Once the ‘food’ is consumed and any tasks are completed, it’s time for sleep in the bunk. But in a boat that is designed to go at high speeds and fly off the waves, it’s not the simplest of tasks.

“It’s quite hard to be a bunk because you fall out of it… so most of the time we can’t stay in the bunks!

“Then you just need to lie on the floor of the boat, on a bean bag, and just hold yourself when you’re sleeping. The movement’s pretty crazy.”

Sometimes, when conditions are steady in the middle of the ocean, the navigator can enter the rotation system – opening up the dreamy possibility of two hours sleep in one stint. But even that is unlikely, Lush admits.

“The maximum you could ever have in your bunk is two hours, but that doesn’t happen that often because you’ll probably be woken up at some point.”

As you might expect, given the other limited facilities, there is also no toilet onboard except for a portable bucket.

“You get to know each other pretty well! In the month that you’re at sea, there will never be anywhere you go where there isn’t someone else,” laughs Lush.

This edition of The Ocean Race features the longest leg in the race’s 50-year history, which will see the boats travel from Cape Town, South Africa, along the Southern Ocean, pass underneath Australia and New Zealand, and finally arrive at the Brazilian port city of Itajai.

But while the prospect of a month’s disrupted sleep and powder refuelling would put the majority of the population off, Lush is embracing the challenge.

“For one month all I’m trying to do is beat the other boats and I get to just focus on that 100%. We leave Cape Town and we need to try and arrive in Brazil before everyone else. That is the only thing I’ll be thinking about for one month.

“I don’t need to get dressed. I don’t need to worry about what we’re going to eat. I don’t have any admin. I can’t read any emails. I don’t have a phone. I don’t have any normal stuff. All I’m doing is trying to do that job really, really well.”

Asked that single word question posed at the beginning of this article – “why?” – Lush concludes: “You learn something about yourself – it’s normally not good! – and you learn quite a lot about people. It’s quite fascinating.

“And there’s definitely something else about being offshore. Seeing every sunrise and every sunset for a month, the stars… we’re just very lucky.

“It’s very extreme where we go, and it’s very hard to survive in those places, and there are definitely times I feel the albatrosses are just laughing at us. They are flying around with no problem, and we’re there with all the latest technology and gear on, and we’re getting absolutely battered just trying to get through it. But not many people get to see that stuff.”

The Ocean Race 2022-23 kicks off with a fast and furious in-port race in Alicante on Sunday, with the main offshore race beginning a week later on January 15.

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