Like the ride in the jet fighter. One minute I'm lobbying some public relations guy at the Air National Guard and a week later I'm upside down in an F-106. And the time I discovered some guys out West had built a car to break the land speed record, a car that could do 500-plus miles per hour - and it had TWO SEATS, so they could take reporters and sponsors for rides. So there I am, working on a story for Maxim about what it's like to ride in a rocket car when - BAM! - the driver hits the afterburner and my organs start rearranging themselves. And there was the bull ride, during a story for Life ...
This time it was a chance to crew on a sailboat, and it's no pleasure cruiser. It's the exact twin of the ASSA ABLOY boat that competed in the Volvo Ocean Race, one of the toughest athletic competitions in the world. Imagine: icebergs and 60-foot waves in the southern ocean, doldrums in the Atlantic, hairball knockdowns that leave the boat on its side, sails in the water ... These sailors aren't ordinary people and they're not driving ordinary boats. These boats are capable of speeds in excess of 30 miles per hour - SAILBOATS! That's faster than the (admittedly beat up) Bayliner I use for wakeboarding.
The Volvo Ocean Race, which used to be called the Whitbread, started from Southampton, England on September 23, 2001. It ended, after about 10 months and 32,700 nautical miles, in Kiel, Germany in June, 2002. The story I did was for Robb Report magazine, and it ran in the July edition. For a copy, just e-mail me. In the meantime this is my journal about my experience. My job was to write about what it's like. No better way to do that than for me to run an entire leg - a short one, by the way. Miami-Baltimore is 875 nautical miles. The longest leg is the first, 7,350 nm from Southampton, England to Cape Town, South Africa.
The Volvo 60s are fast, exciting, twitchy, filled with winches that can take off a finger and manned by some of the best offshore sailors in the world. The guests included several ASSA ABLOY employees and an editor from the Baltimore Sun. But the REAL crew was the professional sailors, including New Zealander Josh Alexander, who crewed on the ASSA race boat during the southern ocean leg from Auckland to Rio de Janiero and who competed in four Sydney to Hobarts. Alexander, a bowman who helped make the ASSA masts, is a guy you want on your side in a fight or when things get bad at sea: durable as stainless, smart, unafraid to say what he thinks and just as quick to help anybody any time.
The run took four days, and it gave us a little of everything: downwind spinnaker runs for hours at a time, fast, moonless night sailing under falling stars, winds so light that we motored (not permissible in the actual race, but OK for us because we were racing only unoffically), a quick stop in the Gulf Stream for a swim some 70 miles out, a tense night sail through the shipping lanes of the Chesapeake and four-hour watches that left us exhausted and ready to sleep soundly, even in the bunks that were nothing more than netting inches from snoring neighbors and a diesel engine that was very loud.
I learned why the grinders on America's Cup boats - the guys furiously pumping those winches - look like Max Steel action figures. We had one. His name is Jan Koekemoer. He's a former pro rugby player from South Africa, scary big and handy when you're lugging 200-pound sails around in a pitching 90-degree hold. Cool as he is, Jan is the reason I will probably never fulfill a simmering ambition to try rugby. I do not want a guy like that twisting my scrawny neck. I learned that making one of these boats go fast while staying relatively safe is really not that complicated. If you can fly a helicopter while eating a hard-shell taco and not spilling anything on your white shirt, you should have it down in a few years. I also formulated a theory that bowmen are the drummers of sailing - a little crazy, people who love to be in the middle of the action, who thrive on having to think fast and well when everybody's yelling and one wrong move could make things very bad. I learned the value of humor on a small boat, when a guy named Gerry Moosbrugger - a world-class sail designer and trimmer - dumped rainwater laying in a sail right on my head, much to everyone's amusement. And then he got me again so well I got wet inside my foul weather jacket, which was even funnier. To everybody else. From the two Swedes - extraordinary sailors named Peter Thorin and Henrik Wikman - I learned the value of teamwork and camaraderie aboard a boat. The guy holding it all together with remarkable patience was skipper Jim Stone, and from him I learned it's not good to repeatedly screw up the adustment of a spinnaker pole when you're sailing up the Chesapeake's shipping channel at night, near shallow water and a stone jetty. Man, I wish I could have those few minutes back, Jim. I'd do better.
There's a lot more to tell - the way the guests, some of who are accomplished sailors in their own right, picked things up so quickly. And the way everybody on the boat became a team, and the stories of the professional sailors who were kind enough to be patient, sharp enough to keep us moving and funny enough to keep us laughing. How so many different people - two Swedes, an the Austrian, a New Zealander, a South African and a bunch of Americans - can get along so well is amazing, especially considering how little the rookies knew about sailing one of these complex machines.
Here's part of a previous story I wrote, an advance I had up on my Web site before my ride.
I have some rough water experience, but not in actual boats, if you want to be technical about it. I've windsurfed hurricane waves off the New Jersey coast and waves with faces approaching 20 feet in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. But boats are different, and the ASSA twin will be going all-out all the time. That's how they have to sail the Volvo now to be competitive, even if it means screaming off the wind with the kite up at night in the southern ocean while dodging icebergs.
ASSA ABLOY is a Swedish boat with several American team members. The ASSA ABLOY Group, headquartered in Stockholm, is the world's leading manufacturer and supplier of locks and locking solutions - including many brands you probably know, like Yale. It's participating in the Volvo Ocean Race to support the integration process of more than 100 companies worldwide and to develop the ASSA ABLOY corporate identity. In North America alone, 35 companies belong to the group.
The two identical ASSA boats were drawn by Bruce Farr, whom I interviewed for a previous story about around-the-world racing. For that story I had to watch the start in Southampton, England from a press boat, and as they were cruising away I told myself I was going to try to get on one of those magnificent boats some day. It may be thrilling but it probably won't be fun. There is NOTHING comfortable about them. Everything is there to keep people alive and help the boat go faster. When the weather is on the nose the spray comes off the bow like a firehose; everything, inside and out, gets wet and stays wet. Trying to get some rest in one of these boats is like trying to sleep inside Aerosmith's drum set. But when you work hard, you'll sleep.
Read what crewmember Richard Mason wrote about Leg Four, through the southern Ocean (This is the leg run by Josh Alexander, who was on board for my ride):
...We weren't just running ice watch for a couple of days. No, it was 24/7 iceberg watch for an entire week. We were weaving through huge lumps of ice, and of course at times you don't even see the growlers (mini-icebergs). Most of the fleet made it through, but unfortunately News Corp didn't, eventually losing their rudder after striking ice just past Cape Horn. Everyone has stories of wild broaches and rogue waves ... On ASSA ABLOY we almost lost the mast on two occasions. Firstly when a runner block exploded, fortunately the rig was caught by safety strops, and secondly when we had a wild broach that saw the boat picked up by the top of a breaking wave and thrown down the wave front. We smashed down the wave on our side.Ê Most of the crew on deck was washed down by the water. I was on deck at the time. Saw the wave coming, grabbed hold of the grinder pedestal, only to be ripped off, washed over the mainsheet through the stacking gear and pinned under the water. If I hadn't been clipped on I wouldn't be writing this. Incidentally, the spinnaker stayed set through the whole wipeout, we popped up and surfed away as if nothing had happened. I can assure you that there were a few knees knocking around the boat after the incident.
