Volvo Ocean Race - Cape Town Stopover

The 2011/12 Volvo Ocean race is less than 20 days from the off.  The ‘home’ port of Alicante in Spain opens its doors to the public on Friday this week, the 6 boats and crews are ready to rock, and for the hand-picked crews, it’s now a fine balance between getting their minds into racing mode, and making the most of the last few weeks with family and loved ones.

Lying in wait is the world’s toughest and most unforgiving ocean race. Predicting a winner is almost impossible in a year that virtually every team has a reason to feel that they are carrying an advantage. The skippers are all very, very good. Their teams are the best for the job.  The 3^rd generation Open 70’s are now familiar beasts in the hands of the crews, and every sailor that steps aboard in Alicante has done this all before.  Chat to any of the men involved, and it becomes clear that fatigue, and who handles it best, will play a massive role this year, as has been the case since man first took on the ocean.

On paper, the sailors work a 4-hours on, 4 hours off shift. That means for every 4 hours spent working, you enjoy 4 hours of sleep. Or does it? Puma Ocean Racings Jono Swain told me that the reality is really very different.

Put yourself aboard a Volvo Open 70 in the Southern Ocean for a few moments.  You’ve got a few layers of clothing and under-garments to protect you from the cold and the elements. For four hours, you’ve been living life at the extreme, in a very hostile place.  To quote ‘Il Mostro’s’  2008 crewman Jerry Kirby, “These boats are man-eaters, they take people, chew them up..and spit them out.”

You go below, after shift, and your heart and head is still racing at 100mph. You’re likely to be very wet, and very cold. You  need to get undressed out of those layers, get dry and get into something  dry to sleep in. This all happens in a very confined space, and often the boat will be moving around a lot. Then you need to get food and liquid into your system.  Jono said you will also be listening to issues up on deck that you will be aware of, and you’re half expecting a call to get back out on deck and assist.  The harsh reality is that you are very seldom getting more than two or possibly two and a half hours of sleep at any time.

Spread that out over a few days, and a few weeks,  in a very testing environment, and fatigue starts to become a factor.  Swain, a race veteran, understands that fatigue effects people differently, but adds that if you’re on a Volvo Ocean race crew, the chances are that your body is able to adjust to the hours, and that you’re  someone who can deal with the pattern. On the upside, the human body is wonderfully designed to reach a point where your body will force itself to shut down and sleep.

Weight, fortunately,  is not the same sort of issue now that it was in years gone by, during the ‘Volvo Open 60’ era. Stories still exist of men cutting off the ends of a toothbrush to save weight,  and whilst that was true aboard the Open 60, it’s not as critical now. Jono Swain says it was a case of skimping on everything back then. “We take more food now, I think about how if effected our performance back then, and how stupid it was. On these boats we make sure we take enough food, and no-one goes hungry. We also take enough snacks, luckily..and thankfully it’s more relaxed now.”

Back on the Open 60’s, it was common for a sailor to lose up to 8 kilograms of body weight on a single leg. On a modern Open 70, and the relaxed weight measures, weight loss averages out at about 3-4 KG for a crewman.

Having said all of this, the Open 70 is not a pleasure boat, and the Volvo Ocean race is not known as ‘the Everest of sailing’ for nothing. 60 super fit sailors are counting down the hours,  the equipment is primed and ready, and you can be sure that their minds are in the right place to go racing to Cape Town on leg 1.

The first leg is 6300 nautical miles, an estimated 23 days at sea, and a mammoth test for man and machine.  Being leg 1, bodies and minds will not be fully in tune with the elements.  They will be tested with the full range of weather systems from the doldrums, to the extreme system in the South that took Ericsson 4 to a 24 Hour world record in 2008.

If you are at the finish at the V & A Waterfront on November 24^th,  go and shake the hands of the crewman. You will look at drawn unshaven faces and  tired, blood-shot,  but happy eyes.  And by the time you have finished admiring their state of the art  70 foot racing machines, the chances are that those men will have disappeared. They will be getting some well deserved sleep in a hotel bed.

An exhausted Ericsson 4 skipper Torben Grael, below, moments after having won the first leg to Cape Town in 2008. Image by Jeff Ayliffe