ROUND-THE-WORLD RACE:For a small country, Ireland's sailing credentials are impressive. Two of the eight boats embarking on next month's round-the-world Volvo Ocean Race are Irish, and we'll get a chance to cheer them on when the race comes to Galway in May, writes Lorna Siggins
ONE SMALL ISLAND, two big boats. Mad, bad or just a mite ambitious? When the Volvo Ocean Race sets off on its global circumnavigation early next month, a quarter of the fleet will have a significant Irish dimension.
What's more, both entries will share west of Ireland lineage - Limerick's Team Delta Lloydhaving confirmed its participation many months after Galway's Green Dragonentry. Skippered by Ger O'Rourke, winner of last year's Fastnet race, Team Delta Lloydis backed by a Dutch sponsor, and will fly the Dutch flag, but will race with Irish among its international crew.
Ironically, the Limerickman's relatively low-budget bid was confirmed on the day that the State sail training vessel, Asgard II, had to be abandoned in the Bay of Biscay, with the safe return of all 25 on board.
The full significance of the sinking, and its potential impact on an invaluable initiative which aimed to prove that sailing was not just a big-budget sport, won't have been lost on those young Irish professionals preparing for the race start in Alicante, Spain.
Gladiators, perhaps, in a former life, these are people who make a career out of their ability to withstand some of the toughest conditions on the planet. Among them on Green Dragonare Kerryman Damian Foxall (39), seven times global circumnavigator and winner of this year's non-stop Barcelona world race with French co-skipper Jean-Pierre Dick. Then there's Wexfordman Justin Slattery (34), veteran of two previous Volvo ocean events, including a round-the-world speed record attempt with the late Steve Fossett.
The Galway backers of Green Dragon- principally businessmen John Killeen and Eamon Conneely, and Co Down project manager Jamie Boag - secured seasoned international Volvo veterans, including Britain's Neal McDonald and Australia's Anthony Merrington, to make up the crew complement, along with Chinese representation and financial support.
Ian Moore (35) is one of the most experienced Irish professional navigators at this level, while several "under 30-year-old" sailors, including Ireland's Scott Millar (25), will also work with British skipper and double Olympic gold medallist, Ian Walker. Walker, who is participating in the 37,000-mile Volvo ocean race for the first time, is also the only member of his crew to have two children of school-going age.
"I'm a sailing widow and we have a feast or famine marriage," says his partner, Lisa Walker. A London-born futures trader, she finds great support within the sailing community of Warsash on the river Hamble in southern England. The couple has agreed that they won't be embracing on the quay after every stage of the race. "Our eldest, Zoe (age seven) is in school and Emilia (four) started this month," she says.
"Having their dad away sailing is all the girls have ever known, so I think they will be fine. "We will go to Capetown, perhaps Singapore, and we couldn't miss Galway. But even when we are there, Ian will be working while on shore. That's something I am very aware of. Loyalties can be split in that situation, and it isn't really fair on anyone."
Connemara-born Eamon Conneely, whose father fished lobster pots from his currach, has been close to Walker since he recruited him to skipper his own award-winning ocean racing TP52 yacht, Patches. The developer, who came late to sailing, wore a mile-wide and welcoming grin as he and Walker invited The Irish Timesout in the bay during Green Dragon'ssummer visit to Galway. And though we were far from growling icebergs and screaming Southern Ocean winds as we cruised out with the Burren to port, the skipper tried to make us feel as if we were . . . well . . . Eric Tabarlys, Robin Knox Johnstons and Ellen McArthurs all rolled into one.
Leaning over the rails as several people on deck prepared one of the vessel's five spinnakers, Walker pointed to the luminous orange shape just below the waterline. My goodness, had we hit something? No, this was the boat's swivelling or "canting" keel fitted with a 10,000 lead bulb which can swing to a 400 angle, counteracting heel and conserving wind energy that might be lost off the top of the sail.
Designed as the fastest class of monohulls ever, these Volvo 70s have retractable daggerboards to counteract leeway, or slipping sideways while the keel is in motion. However, any discussion of this level of competition can quickly descend into clichés or technical talk, or silence. It is also difficult to have a normal conversation about the weather with those who relish the wind advantage of savage storms, while living on freeze-dried diets in cramped carbon fibre hulls and hot bunking in soaked sleeping bags called "home".
And then, just as relentless four-hour watch duty and repetitive salt chafe reaches a nadir, there is the noise, colour, cameras and razzmatazz in each of 11 stop-over ports.
The route from Alicante takes in Capetown, Kochi, Singapore, Qingdao, Rio de Janeiro and Boston before arriving in Galway on May 23rd 2009. It continues to Gothenburg and Stockholm before it finishes in the Russian port of St Petersburg in June 2009. The longest leg is the 12,300 nautical mile-two-month voyage from Qingdao in China to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
Showing us the spartan conditions below in Green Dragon, Slattery admitted that one could become a "bit anal about keeping gear tidy". As bowman, and built for it, he has one of the least envied jobs on board - and a resilience developed in two Volvos and countless other offshore contests, including the 1998 Sydney-Hobart race which claimed six lives.
His role is one which he described with some considerable candour in Life at the Extreme: the Volvo Ocean Race Round the World 2005-6, by Australian author Rob Mundle: "When you know that the moment is coming you just get down and hug the deck and hold on as hard as you can to anything you can find," Slattery said of his task up forward on the winning yacht, ABN Amro One.
"Suddenly you're completely under water . . . and you go tumbling aft. You can feel different parts of the boat hitting your body as you go, and you're trying to figure out where you are so you might be able to grab on to something. There's enormous relief when you finally do have impact: you know then that you're still on the boat."
Sadly, that race claimed the life of Dutch sailor Hans Horrevoets on a sister vessel, ABN Amro Two. Why do they do it? "Because it scares the living daylights out of you," Dubliner Gordon Maguire told this reporter back in 2002, speaking from Rio de Janeiro, when he and Slattery were crew members of Team News Corp, one of eight yachts competing in that season's race.
A veteran Whitbread/Volvo competitor, Maguire was selected for NCB Ireland, Ireland's first and only previous round-the-world entry in 1989. A surfeit of business egos and unrealistic expectations put enormous pressure on the Irish crew back then - Maguire himself "relocated" to another vessel midway. There was also female Irish participation that year, with Dún Laoghaire sailor Angela Farrell on Tracy Edwards' yacht, Maiden.
By that stage, the race originally known as the Whitbread had taken a significant leap forward from the early 1970s, days of paper charts and sextant, mutinies that went unreported, and gin and tonics after every watch. New technology had transformed competitive offshore sailing, and no more would boats and crew disappear into the sunset. This in turn would attract "big name sponsors, big budgets, new expectations for media support," as Mundle noted.
The 2008-9 race takes this a stage further, with a dedicated "media" crew member in each boat who will not be involved in sailing, but will edit and file reports, including footage from 12 fixed cameras on board. "I don't think we took up sailing for this sort of attention," Foxall admitted, but Slattery and Walker shared a different perspective. Not only would it represent "great value for the sponsors," but it would also give the wider public a taste of the agony and ecstasy of being at sea, they suggested.
Slattery recalled how one crew member in a Volvo race was actually thrown through the wall of the "heads" or toilet, by the swell during a rough passage. "Yes, there's all that dirt and water and real life on board that people will witness," Foxall concurred.
Fáilte Ireland is backing the two-week Galway stopover next May, when up to 140,000 visitors are expected to spend an estimated €43 million in the region. As John Killeen points out, team tents in every host port will ensure a significant profile for "Ireland Inc" around the world, in yachting's version of the Ryder Cup.
Both Team Delta Lloydand Green Dragonpassed their 2,000-mile qualifiers and are preparing for next Saturday's in-port racing and the race start on October 11th.
"I have never felt so much excitement from going sailing without racing in my life," skipper Walker wrote of his qualifying trip. "These boats are outrageous and awesome in equal measures, hurtling along at 20-25 knots in the pitch black and repeatedly piling into the backs of waves that you couldn't see, over 400 miles from the nearest land . . ."
See www.volvooceanrace.org
• For breaking news on Green Dragon www.greendragonracing.com
• For information on the Galway Volvo Ocean Race stopover www.letsdoitgalway.com
Coverage of the race starts on Saturday, October 18th on TG4