Night of the yacht

November 30, 12:30 a.m.: Forget the Formula 1 night race and all those cricket matches in floodlit stadiums. Following a Volvo Ocean Race yacht after sundown is night sport at its best. I am on a rigid inflatable boat (RIB) of the Customs and we are off to see Ericsson 4 finish.

Powered by two Mariner Magnums that drink around 150 litres of petrol an hour, the RIB zooms, throwing sheets of spray. We pass Dufferin Point to our right; on the left, Fort Kochi is asleep and dark, except for lanterns on Chinese fishing nets. The Puthuvypeen lighthouse fleetingly jabs a finger of light into the darkness. Kochi city is now just a long glow, low on the horizon. The rest of the world is just the night sky and dark water. The engines splutter and die; water hyacinths have fouled the propellor. Bad news at the finishing point, too. E4 is ‘parked’ in a no-wind zone and might come only at around 7 a.m. We head back.

2:15 a.m.: I’m sleepy. On the 15-km drive home, over the car stereo Raghu Dixit complains “Khidki ye sone na dere/raath bhar mujhe jagaye re.” No, no you got it wrong, buddy. Not the windows, it’s VOR that’s keeping me awake.

3:30 a.m.: VOR International Press Officer Sophie Luther calls: E4 has found wind.

4:00 a.m.: Back at sea. Photographers ask VOR Communications Director Marcus Hutchinson if there will be floodlights to light up E4. He grins, “Floodlights in the Arabian Sea?” As we catch up with E4, flashes pop like streaks of lightning. The TV crews’ lights seem like so many glowing matchsticks. RIBs zoom all around E4. VOR has arrived.

4:50 a.m.: Back at the pontoon, Sophie teaches me the best way to lash down a RIB. After the prize giving ceremony, Torben and the boys head for a bite, shower and beer—not necessarily in that order!

6:00 a.m.: Back home and in bed. Now if that isn’t a night to remember, tell me what is!

Grael’s Grail-hunt

Exclusive Interview/Torben Grael, skipper, Ericsson 4

He is not called ‘Turbine’ for fun. Torben Grael is the Brazilian with the highest number of Olympic medals. With five Olympic medals, including golds in Atlanta and Athens, he is the Olympian with the highest number of medals in sailing. Grael skippered Brasil 1 which came third in the 2006 VOR and this time he is out to secure yachting’s Holy Grail.

Torben and his boys won both Cape Town and Kochi legs, scored 26 out of 28 points and broke the record for the farthest distance sailed in 24 hours. The Grael family and ace sailor Marcelo Ferreira founded the Projeto Grael, which teaches underprivileged children to sail. Dockside rumours say Grael is paid around € 16 million to skipper the Ericsson 4. Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

What special preparation did you take to break the record?

[Laughs] If you set out with the sole aim of breaking a record, it’s already difficult. When you plan to break a record, you wait for perfect conditions. But this is impossible in a race. Luckily, we had good conditions on our route. Our aim was to win the leg; the record was a bonus.

In terms of the record, what edge did you have that other teams didn’t?

Well, nothing. We followed a wind system that took us straight to Cape Town. If you see the graph, many other teams had to go south to find wind and then come up. Our training base in Lanzarote, Spain, has both light winds and very strong ones. So the crew was prepared, unlike others who trained in places with moderate winds.

Wasn’t it tough on the crew?

Very. More speed means more water coming on board; more spray. When you change a sail, you usually need the whole crew. The sleeping guys have to get out of bed, dress, come up, change sail, undress and go back to bed—very frustrating! But they did it without complaining.

How do you feel about the effort, now that it is over?

Feels great. It’s like running. [Laughs] I hate running, but I do it because the feeling afterwards is great.

Olympic winner Marcelo Ferreira is your favoured sailing partner and your brother, Lars Grael, has two Olympic medals, too. Why don’t they sail in VOR?

Marcelo seems to be satisfied with his experience onboard Brasil 1 in 2006 [laughs]. Lars loves offshore sailing, but he lost a leg in a sailing accident a few years back. During a regatta, his Tornado-class yacht was run over by a motorboat and the propeller severed his leg. He still sails offshore races in Brazil, but the VOR…

How is the Projeto Grael doing?

It’s doing very well. Lars, Marcelo and I started it in 1996 as a sailing school, but most kids who came did not know swimming. So we first taught them to swim and then to sail! All of them were from ordinary families and it was frustrating for them to have learnt sailing and to have no access to yachts. So now the project trains them in nautical craft like sail-making, fibreglass working, carpentry and navigation. This helps them earn and sail. Many of them have won competitions; some work as referees and race officials. All courses are taught free.

We started with a tent and two containers on the beach. Recently I purchased a waterfront property for the project. It is an old hotel in disrepair, so I could afford it [laughs].

How does your family feel about you being at sea?

I started with my grandfather when I was seven years old. My wife, Andrea, sails and my children Marco, 19, and Martine, 17, are Optimist class sailors. If VOR is the F1 of sailing, Optimists are the go-karts.

We don’t have much of a yachting culture in India. How good are Kochi’s yachting conditions?

It’s good, you have a good sea breeze for local offshore sailing; the climate is warm and the winds moderate. Isn’t that much better that learning to sail in Nordic countries?

By Mathew T. George and published in THE WEEK dated December 21.

Men of men

The doctor’s cabin in Team Ericsson’s base has the photo of a bloodied, calloused and cracked claw tacked to the cork board. “It is Phil ‘Blood’ Jameson’s hand,” says Joel R. Morgan, the team physio; Blood is the bowman on Ericsson 4. “All the handling of ropes and lugging of equipment makes the palms rough and calloused. And then the dousing with sea water softens them up. The result is this mess. It must have stung him real bad. Wounds and salt water do not agree, you see!”

A cracked palm is, perhaps, the least of the worries in the Volvo Ocean Race. At each stopover, the team physios and medics get nightmares seeing the condition in which they get back their sailors. From cracked bones to torn ligaments and concussions, there are injuries galore. A common ailment, Joel says, is ‘gunwale bum’, where skin pores get blocked and become pus-filled pustules.

Now what prompts a man to spend around nine months at sea, racing 37,000 nautical miles in the VOR from Alicante, Spain, to St Petersburg, Russia? “We choose this life because we would like to be crazy or different,” says Anthony Spillebeen, Team Ericsson’s planning manager. “We are guns on hire. Someone who sees your work and likes it, recommends you for their team next time. So your work and attitude better be the best. Otherwise how can the team put you in a racing yacht where the living space is only around two metres per person?”

While skippers are the ones who choose the crew, a good word does go a long way. A chosen team usually starts practicing around a year before the race. The practice period includes team activities on water and body building exercises, too. “It is not about biceps and six-packs,” says Joel. “There is a lot of pulling, lifting and dragging to do on the yacht. Add unsteady footing to it. You might need one hand to hold on and another hand for the activity. So the question is about endurance. It is about teaching your body to forgive, adapt and move on.”

Sailing skills are a given as all of the crew on the VOR come with excellent skills gathered from other races. Most of them have done offshore racing in Europe and Australia. Most of the elite sailors have done prestigious events like the Sydney-Hobart Race and the America’s Cup before doing the VOR. Most professional sailors sail round the year and shift base as seasons change. The oldest sailor in VOR 2008-09 is Magnus Olsson, 59. The watch captain on Ericsson 3 is on his sixth VOR and says that he has spent 54 months at sea for VORs alone!

THE WEEK caught up with Morgan White, the youngest sailor on the Cape Town-Kochi leg. Bowman on the Delta Lloyd, the Aussie started sailing when he was six and turned 24 on December 1, the day the Delta Lloyd reached Kochi. Why is White at sea when the rest of his friends are partying and chatting up girls in Sydney? He grins infectiously and says: “You go home and meet this guy running a chicken stall or a fish ’n’ chips stall. You say hi, wassup? He says, ‘Nothing much, mate.’ Six months later you ask him and he’ll have the same answer. Ask me wassup? I have a different answer every day!”

And this variety comes at a cost. A sailor burns around 5,000 calories a day, twice the amount normal people do. And the weight-loss is high, too. Sailors have known to lose up to 11kg on a leg. Says Michael Muller, 25, of PUMA il mostro: “Losing around 6kg on a leg is regular. It varies, especially because different people react differently to the food onboard.”All food is freeze-dried to remove moisture and help it stay unspoilt.

When THE WEEK went onboard the Green Dragon and asked for the galley (kitchen), press officer Lucy Harwood grinned, pointed at a console with a glass jar for hot water and said, “That’s it.” Cooking can’t get simpler—add desalinated water to the freeze-dried packets and leave it for around 10 minutes. The resultant meal is gooey and insipid. Dockside cynics say no team has been able to find a piece of chicken in the chicken meal packages! Liquor is a no-no on the yachts as it dehydrates the body.

Though no one is forthcoming about the money paid to sailors, dockside rumours say that Ericsson 4 skipper Torben Grael could be paid as much as € 16 million. That’s not surprising, considering that Team Ericsson’s reported budget is around Rs 310 crore. Spillebeen says, “We are not paid as well as European footballers or Indian cricketers, perhaps. But whatever is paid is in keeping with the risks taken. Moreover, it is a one time payment and we have to take care of pension and other benefits ourselves.” White says that elite sailors are paid their asking price because they are always in short demand. But what can compensate for the risks these men take? Sports physiologists say the human body takes up to six months to recuperate from a marathon race. Then what impact does an Ironman triathlon or VOR leave behind?

By Mathew T. George and published in THE WEEK dated December 21. See www.the-week.com

Kochi-coos!

Gentlemen never keep a lady waiting. And the sailors of the Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09 proved their chivalry by reaching early for their date with the Queen of the Arabian Sea. The first to call on the Queen was skipper Torben Grael and his men on board the Ericsson 4. They crossed the line at 4:22 a.m. on November 30; the ETA was December 3. Preceded by three tugs spraying plumes of water in welcome, Ericsson 4 tied up at the pontoon on Willingdon Island, Kochi, as the team anthem, Metallica’s Enter Sandman, boomed across the bay. Exit light/Enter night/Take my hand/Off to never never land, went the refrain as the jubilant Ericsson shore crew and families of crew members welcomed the yachtsmen with hugs and kisses all around.

The second to arrive was Telefonica Blue skippered by Bouwe Bekking. The Blues sailed in at 6:07 p.m., against the backdrop of a magnificent sunset. Skipper Anders Lewander claimed the third position by bringing in Ericsson 3 at 1:06 p.m. on December 1. The finishing point was an imaginary line between Kochi port’s first channel-marking buoy and the INS Tarangini, a three-masted barque of the Indian Navy anchored at seas.

Soon it was pouring yachts at the pontoon, Fernando Echavarri, Beijing Olympics gold medallist in Tornado-class sailing, brought in the Telefonica Black at 5:30 p.m. The ‘photo finish’ came when skipper Ken Read put PUMA Il Mostro across the line at 6:02 p.m., followed by Roberto Bermudez with the Delta Lloyd (6:09 p.m.) and Ian Walker on the Green Dragon (6:38 p.m.). After 4,450 nautical miles through squalls and the Doldrums, these three Volvo 70s had touched base in a window of 40 minutes! Team Russia reached Kochi at 6:53 p.m. on December 3.

Meanwhile, the response from the public has been excellent. Crowds turned up late in the evening to cheer the yachts as they arrived. The race village, too, has become a hit. The Volvo ‘igloo’ which houses a yacht simulator, complete with a heaving floor, is the biggest crowd puller. The stopover website, www.cochinoceanrace.com, is attracting around 30,000 hits a day says Binosh Bruce of Primmero Technologies, which runs the site.

The Volvo Open 70 is the class of the yachts raced in the VOR. Made of carbon fibre, V70s weigh around 14,000kg and are 70.5 ft long. A V70 parked upright will be one metre taller than the Sistine Chapel. Designed to exceed speeds of 30 knots—55kmph—a V70 carries up to 24 sails, the biggest of which can cover two tennis courts! To top it all, the mast is a whopping 103.3ft above water. The V70s carry two Volvo Penta engines, one for powering the boat in emergency situations and the other for powering the generator on board.

The standard crew on a V70 is 11 hands. “The skipper chooses the crew,” says Read. “Most of us in VOR have sailed with or against each other. So it is easy to pick a crowd, balancing the strengths and weaknesses.” Of the 11, one is the media crew member, who is not allowed to help sail the yacht. The remaining 10 are divided into two watches of four men each; the navigator and skipper do not have a specific watch. When one watch sleeps, the other sails the yacht.

“The skipper and navigator are always on call,” says Torben. “Perhaps just when you take off to bed, fresh meteorological data comes in and we have to stay up to plan. We are expected to keep both watch-captains updated.” On the Alicante-Cape Town leg, Ericsson 4 had to evacuate crewman Tony Mutter and Torben filled in for him on the watch, leaving navigator Jules Salter on the weather desk.

Most of the yachts have taken a beating on the Cape Town-Kochi leg. Ericsson 4 had minor problems with the rudder, PUMA Il Mostro cracked the longitudinal frames that keep the yacht from bending in half; Green Dragon broke its boom—the pole at the bottom edge of a sail and both Telefonica yachts broke their dagger boards, the panels that stop a yacht from slipping sideways. Walker says: "You can see Telefonica guys carrying dagger boards tucked under the arm. We need three guys to carry ours. You make choices. You build it stronger and make it more reliable or you push the envelope. The team that treads that line best manages the best result."

How does the race committee monitor possibilities of cheating at sea? What if the team switches on the motor on in a windless zone? Well, the engine is sealed as teams leave port and it is checked at each finish line. Oh, there is another small matter: there are five fixed cameras on board that can be rotated 360⁰, this includes one mounted below the deck. Then there are the two handheld cameras with the media crew member. Speak of eyes in the sky!