Roger Lean Vercoe
Every experience changes you, some more than others. This was a big one...
Wednesday 14 July 2010, 15:30 GMT
Words: Bob Fisher
To be competitive in a round-the-world race requires perseverance, dedication and personal sacrifice. Ahead of the Volvo Ocean Race Legends Regatta next year, Bob Fisher looks at planning and individual hardship in races gone by.
When Paul Cayard was approached by the EF team for the 1997-98 race, he was already involved in another big project. "Johan Salen and Richard Brisius were looking for a replacement for Lawrie Smith who was going to leave the EF team to start his own campaign with Silk Cut," Cayard revealed.
"Richard and Johan contacted me and at first I said ‘No'. I was starting my America's Cup campaign for 2000 with AmericaOne. They persisted and pointed out that the Cup was a full 18 months after the finish of The Whitbread, so I decided to do it."
That decision was to change the way he looked at ocean racing and the way in which others subsequently planned their campaigns. For him, it was a different experience.
"Every experience changes you, some more than others. This was a big one. During this race, you have a chance to think about mortality. I think you come back from something like that and realise that your time on the planet is short and every day is a blessing, so make the most of it."
Conny van Rietschoten had his brush with mortality on the second leg of the 1981-82 race when he suffered a coronary thrombosis while steering Flyer. With Dr Julian Fuller onboard, his treatment consisted of medication and bunk rest, and a refusal to ask the doctor onboard the deadly rival, Ceramco, for a second opinion.
"If the Kiwis had known that I had a health problem, they might have been encouraged to push their boat harder, and how would we have kept them down then?"
Van Rietschoten said that the worst moments were when Flyer had no wind and the others had plenty. "That's the worst, the worst, the worst," he declared. Certainly, it was not in the financing of the campaigns. "I could afford it and it was nice to have seen it all," he said. "It was wonderful, particularly doing it well."
The Dutchman had each time prepared his boat better than his rivals; indeed designer, the late Olin Stephens compared Conny's preparation very favourably to that of Mike Vanderbilt with Ranger for the 1937 America's Cup.
"I'd learned in business," Conny said, "that good preparation is all-important."
Roy Mullender, the training skipper for the Royal Navy's Adventure in the first race (1973-74) agreed that pre-race preparation was the key to the Nicholson 55 winning three of the four legs on corrected time. "We trained the racing crews from the moment we took delivery of the yacht, and each one contributed to how it might be altered to suit for long distance racing."
Mullender didn't have financial problems either - once he had convinced his superior officers that a services entry was important for the Navy's morale in peacetime. "The Joint Services Sailing Club was replacing the wartime windfalls with Nicholson 55s," he explained, "and Adventure was the first to be delivered. We didn't have to pay for the boat and we had a budget of "£60,000 for the race."
Others would have liked similar support. Les Williams recalled, "We had just £10,000 from Burton Tailoring," for the 80-foot Burton Cutter (1973-74), "and the crew was given sheets of plywood to build their own bunks once they joined the boat."
Building bunks is unlikely to happen in today's race, but, for the crews of today, the personal hardships are still there, but perhaps in a different guise.
Blake's record of sailing in the first five Whitbread races enabled him to see how to tackle the personal hardships that he described so clearly. "You need a pee. Urgently. But someone is already ‘in there', with others waiting. You ask whoever is ‘in there' to pass out a plastic bag.
"There was very little privacy in anything you did. With your wet-weather trousers on (soggy), you made your way to the galley for a bowl of porridge, covered with brown sugar and reconstituted dried milk. Then maybe a pancake or a boiled egg, or, better still, last night's free-dried leftovers that had been headed up."
Happily for him, Sir Peter sailed in the days long before Volvo Ocean 60s or Volvo Open 70s. Pancakes and a boiled egg for breakfast? Not on the Volvo Ocean Race 2011-12.
Bob Fisher / PPL