Paul Cayard
Full scale… the author on the handles in the Southern Ocean during the 1997-98 Whitbread Race, which Cayard’s team on EF Language dominated. Cayard’s race entry marked a step-up in intensity on the back of his America’s Cup experience – but the EF team also relied a great deal on the salty sea dog that was the magnificent Magnus Olsson… who kept his speed freaks in check when conditions required
A different kind of sailboat race
I am closely watching the Volvo Ocean Race, interested to see how the one-design boats change the game from past editions. I sailed on Alvimedicalast spring for a four-day training trip, so I feel like I have some insight to this iteration of the event, but I know enough to know that I don’t know what is really going
on inside the teams onboard.
So my observations are those of a spectator, one who used to be on the inside, when I did the race with Pirates of the Caribbean in 2006 and, before that, the last Whitbread Race on EF Languagein 1998.
The one-design aspect of this edition is a game changer. However, the game has been changing for years. In the early years of the race, which means the Whitbread years, no two boats were alike. Some were 80ft with two masts and weighed 40 tons, while others were as small as 50ft. The boats were rated, then handicapped, and their finish position was calculated on a ‘corrected’ time. The winner was the yacht with the lowest total corrected time for the entire race, as on the Tour de France bike race, not leg-by-leg scoring.
Then for the 1993 race the organisers created the Whitbread 60 in an effort to create better racing. This was a class of boat with some design space but the major parameters, like length, beam, displacement, sail area, draft and crew number, had limits. I raced in the second edition of the Whitbread 60 (later Volvo 60) era and then the first edition of the Volvo 70s. Here are a few of the tasks that are not part of today’s Volvo Ocean Race in one-designs: 1. We had to decide which designer to go with. EF Language
20 SEAHORSE
was a Farr design. There were three other design offices being used by the 10 teams. 2. Next was to decide the actual design of the yacht within the limits of the class rule. 3. Then choose the builder and to send a part of the team there to help with construction, especially in the final stages. 4. We had to pick our sail designer and sailmaker. There was a lot going on in sail development and innovation for those races which subsequently impacted sailing as we know it. For example, on EFwe developed the first true Code 0. 5. We had to pick and work with our spar and rigging manu facturers. All of this often made the difference over 37,000 miles of racetrack. There was definitely some skill in getting this stuff right. Magnus Olsson was our guru on EFand he is a big reason why we won the race in 1997-98. I can tell you that it was very interesting to be part of the team that got it right… and it made for a much easier ride around the planet. It was more expensive than the pure one-design Volvo of today, though!
In 1998 we had 17 sails onboard. Today they have seven. We were allowed 17 more, to be added during the race. Today they are allowed four more! When you tacked or gybed in 1998 you had to move everything onboard from one side to the other, same as today.
But with up to 17 sails on deck it was a ‘shit-show’, as we say in the sophisticated world of professional sailing. Once, on leg 2, we lost one of the 17 sails overboard and didn’t realise it for six days! Is that excess?
Because you had so many sails some of them were very light and invariably you left them up in too much wind. Bad news for Marco Constant, who spent more than half the race down below
VAN DER BORCH
RICK TOMLINSON
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