Definitely not a nice safe ride in your father’s Volvo

Wooden ships and iron men.

Some things never change. I mean the spirit of that old British Navy motto. Our ships may no longer be built of wood, but the men and women who sail them are still made of stronger stuff than their vessels.

We know this from the Volvo Ocean Race. The boats have been breaking in near catastrophic fashion; the sailors have endured. They are engaged in a quest so perilous it recalls those days of fragile wooden ships when the boldest explorers, the most intrepid adventurers on the planet, were sailors. The Volvo race may be an outrageous spectacle, but it speaks well for sailing and, for that matter, for the human spirit.

I know I’ll get an argument there. There are folks who think sending people out into the most dangerous reaches of the oceans in unseaworthy boats makes sailing look bad. When four of the seven boats in the contest were seriously damaged in the first 24 hours of a 32,700-mile race around the world, the letters to the editor section of the Scuttlebutt Web newsletter (you can read about its founder and editor elsewhere in this issue) lit up with criticism of, as one outraged correspondent put it, “the reckless disregard of race boat designers and owners for the lives of their crews.” Another correspondent, who happens to be a friend of mine, weighed in by chastising Volvo for exhibiting the irony of a carmaker known for the safety of its vehicles sponsoring a race featuring unsafe boats.

Admirable thoughts, of course. Someone needs to speak up for good sense and safety. Had the Internet been around 160 years ago, there no doubt would have been plenty of hand-wringing postings expressing outrage over wagon trains taking people west through hostile territory in unsafe vehicles.

I’m sure the crews of the Volvo boats appreciate the support, but they don’t need it. They knew what they were getting into, just as mountain climbers and space ship riders know the risks. The Volvo sailors are the modern equivalents of the men who signed on with Ernest Shackleton. They are professionals, and they will be well paid in coin and glory for risking their lives.

What is most remarkable about the Volvo race, though, is not the people in it; it’s the boats. And the news about the boats is not that they’re flimsy and prone to breakdown; it’s that, beyond expectations, they have proven to be among the fastest sailing craft ever designed.

It wasn’t long ago that in the world of extreme sailing, monohulls had pretty much been consigned to the scrap heap of obsolescence, so dominant were multihulls. Now look what’s happened: On the first leg, from Vigo, Spain, to Cape Town, South Africa, the Juan Kouyoumdjian-designed ABN Amro One set a new monohull record for distance sailed in 24 hours—546 miles, an average speed of 23.75 knots. That’s about 150 miles less than the multihull record, but that was set by a 110-foot long catamaran. Amro One and the other Volvo Ocean Race boats are only 70 feet long. It’s not unreasonable to think that a 110-foot version of a VOR70 would sail faster than the multihull record. In fact, it might not be unreasonable to think a 70 could do it, assuming it could hold together. There have been reports of the boats sailing at 40 knots.

The instrument that has goosed the evolution of monohull performance is the canting keel. Being able to lever ballast to windward enables the VOR70s to carry twice as much sail as the 60-foot boats that sailed in the last Volvo race. The righting moment magic of this adjustable ballast is so potent that designers have gone to incredible extremes to scavenge weight from the hull and cram it into the keel. Most of the VOR70s don’t carry spinnaker poles. It’s not that they wouldn’t like to have them for square running conditions. It’s that they reckon they’ll get more speed by converting the weight the pole would have put on deck into lead in the keel.

Canting keels, alas, are also the instrument of the boats’ vulnerability, Achilles heels whose mechanical and hydraulic complexity is at odds with the crude forces of nature. One boat barely survived the nightmare of an out-of-control keel swinging from side to side like a very heavy pendulum. Structures built around the keel assembly to keep the sea out are vulnerable too. Black Pearl, skippered by Paul Cayard, came within an eyelash of sinking when the seals on the keel box blew out. On top of all that there is the challenging physics of these exotic contraptions. When a VOR70 flies off a wave, the hull stops when it hits the bottom of the trough. The keel, perhaps twice as heavy as the hull, wants to keep going.

As sailors climbed the learning curve on the first leg, they developed a skill not normally useful in sailboat racing—slowing down. Perfecting the art of throttling back to avoid disaster is now seen as a key to winning the race.

Meanwhile, the 10-member crews have been severely taxed trying to manage the overcanvassed 70-foot dinghy-like boats that have been described as 100-footers with the ends cut off—and getting the rides of their lives. Here’s how Simon Fisher, navigator on ABN Amro Two, described the sailing on a day when the boat traveled 543 nautical miles in a report to The Times of London:

“Without doubt this is definitely life at the extreme. The whole boat is shuddering and shaking as we crash through one wave to the next. All the winches and blocks are screaming and cracking like cannon fire under the load. Water is pouring down the deck and into the hatch, so we have to bail out every half an hour or so to avoid turning the leeward side of the boat into a swimming pool. On deck it’s like standing in front of a fire hose and you have to hang on to stay in the cockpit. Only an hour ago Bicey (Nick Bice) was swept off the stack (sails piled up on the windward side deck) and down the cockpit.”

I’d like to experience that, providing I could leave the boat after a few hours and have a bracing toddy in a warm, dry place. Technology hasn’t advanced quite that far, so I’ll experience the thrills of one of the great sailing adventures of this young century vicariously by keeping up with the communications coming from the boats.

I don’t mean to be glib about the risks facing the players in this drama. The dangers are real and getting worse on the dreaded second leg, which passes through the Southern Ocean.

My wish for these iron sailors is that the “wooden” ships—actually thin composite ships of manmade fiber and bonding agents—they cling to as they go boldly around the world at faster speeds than singlehulled sailboats have ever sailed be as sturdy as they are.