They turned east and, soon after, lost the bet. The wind dropped, they missed the most favorable position to cross the Doldrums, and they slipped to eleventh place. Fed up with the conditions, members of the crew began to lose faith in their strategy. One crew member complained that he had wasted three years of his life training for the race. The solution was to reset the goal. I called the crew up on deck, and we discussed what had happened, ... 'We're in the eleventh position,' I told them. 'We can't think about winning. We're going to set ourselves new targets to beat as many boats as we can, one boat at a time.'
More Quotes from Simon Walker:
Somerset is the only club that I ever wanted to ride for this year. Being left out of the team last season made me even more determined to get my team place back, and that was the motivating factor throughout last year.Simon Walker
At 8 AM one day, Walker and his crew lined up on the boat's foredeck and prepared to take in the 100-pound anchor. There was one particular guy who probably drank a few too many beers the night before. Suddenly, he says he's got a bad back -- right in front of the entire crew, ... Everyone knows his back is fine. So all eyes turn to me to see what I'm going to do. Do I confront him Do I let him get away with it I had a split second to decide.
Simon Walker
No one was getting the whole picture, thank God, ... But confiding in each of them was the only way for me to handle the loneliness of command, which is very, very real.
Simon Walker
Some of the other boats did everything exactly the same way, from start to finish. On our boat, there wasn't a single operation at the end of the race that we did the same way as in the beginning. You were learning, changing, and evolving all the time. If you weren't, you were dead.
Simon Walker
We were out there in the Southern Ocean, feeling very insignificant in a big part of the planet, ... At any minute, another storm would sweep in. We hatched a plan Spike and I would climb up and jury-rig the fitting. As we started the climb, I told the crew that they must helm the yacht very carefully on the opposite tack, as the rigging was only holding up one side of the mast. If the helmsman made a mistake while we were up on the mast, we'd crash down over the side with the entire rig on top of us.
Simon Walker
There's a watch change at two in the morning, ... So seven people who have been on deck for four hours in immense waves and windchill get to go down below. They're covered in sleet. They're bruised. They're exhausted. And they've got four hours before they're due back on deck. They clamber out of their dry suits. They lay out their moldy sleeping bags on the bunks on the high side of the boat, and they get in. They've already used up 30 minutes. After another half hour, the wind shifts, and the guys on deck need to tack the boat. That means the guys down below have to wake up, grab their sleeping bags, walk across the boat, and lay out on the other side. Now they've lost even more sleep.
Simon Walker
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Based on Topics: Goals Quotes, Place Quotes, Strategy Quotes, Success Quotes, Time QuotesBased on Keywords: eleventh, reset
I don't really think about what the subject of my next album will be. I just know that I'm going to make another album.
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Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.
Kevin J. Anderson
Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.
Irving Babbitt