I Spent Three Sweltering Days Shredding The High Seas At Jogging Pace, And It Ruled

Sisi is a Volvo Ocean 65 racing sailboat. She is fast as hell and built for sickos. She is not a comfortable luxury yacht, I assure you. Sisi is a frightening, angry, 72-foot, 12-ton sea monster. Sisi, owned and operated by an Austrian company called Kora Yachts, is used for racing, her calendar divided between summers in the Mediterranean and winters in the Caribbean, or what the rest of us know as "the life." In between all the racing, Sisi has to be delivered from port to port. To get to the starting mark of the Palermo–Montecarlo Regatta, she had to be sailed from the finishing mark of the Aegean600, in Sounion, Greece, to the port of Palermo. With roughly a month between the two races, Sisi's crew first delivered her to the top-of-the-line facilities at Marina Genova, adjacent to the international airport along the western waterfront of downtown Genoa, in northern Italy. There, across the harbor from the vast and imposing Fincantieri shipyard, Sisi was cleaned up, tightened up, and provisioned, and prepared to take on fresh crew for a three-day, 480-mile transit down the Tyrrhenian Sea. On Monday morning, Aug. 10, at approximately 9:00 a.m., I sat on a duffel bag in the shade of a dockside oleander at Marina Genova, watching from an awkward distance as several youthful Austrian crewmembers bounced around in Sisi's shallow cockpit. Photographs I'd consulted in preparation for this moment showed her painted a cheerful blue, but sometime recently Kora Yachts had decided to repaint Sisi's sides and keel a decidedly uncheerful black, all the better to represent her vicious demeanor. Sisi, already shimmering at this early hour behind rising columns of heated air, seemed small beneath her own towering mast, and to sit conspicuously low in the water. Hunkered down at dock Sisi looks lean and stark and scary, her low white deck gleaming above her black sides like the bleached skull of some primordial monstrosity. The feeling, watching her in the morning's meager shade, was not unlike the moments before skydiving out of an airplane. What am I doing here? Am I really about to do this? Why have I done this, and is it too late to back out?

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