The Hindu Business Line : Get set... Sail!

It's the longest yacht race in the world and every second of the action is captured on camera. The Volvo Ocean Race begins in November this year from Vigo, Spain.

Somewhere deep in Hampshire County in southeast England at a place called Whiteley, a small team is busy preparing for a mega event that they love to call the Mount Everest of racing. It is a race that spans four oceans, five continents and covers 33,000 miles of the most treacherous seas on earth. And all on a yacht that is no more than 70 ft long and powered purely by the wind acting on the sails!

Welcome to Volvo Ocean Race 2005-06, that pits man against the extreme forces of nature. It tests the endurance, skills and courage of both man and machine over an eight-month voyage that touches 10 ports around the world.

Held every four years, the ninth edition of this race is set for launch on November 5 from Vigo, Spain, and will touch Cape Town, Melbourne, Wellington (New Zealand), Rio de Janeiro, Baltimore, New York, Portsmouth (England) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) before culminating in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the third week of June 2006.

From Whitbread to Volvo

It all began in 1971 when a group of sailors got together and conceived a race that would push the endurance of crews and boats to the ultimate limits. They thought of a race around the world for all of 27,000 miles! But the problem was finding funds for a proposition that was thought foolhardy at that time.

In stepped Whitbread plc, a British hospitality company, along with the Royal Navy Sailing Association, which also had similar plans for a sailing expedition around the world. Together, they made the race a reality.

The first Whitbread Round the World Race was flagged off on September 8, 1973, with 17 boats carrying 167 crew members. There has been no looking back since.

AB Volvo, the $29-billion Swedish truck, bus and construction equipment company, stepped in as sponsor in 1997-98 and took over the race entirely in 2001-02, lending its name to the race which for the first time ended in Kiel, Germany, rather than Southampton or Portsmouth in England as in the previous years. The Volvo Ocean Race (VOR) 2005-06 will end at Gothenburg, the home of AB Volvo.

Sweden's maritime tradition is something that it is justifiably proud of and Gothenburg is the nerve centre. Gothenburg has an ancient maritime history and it even had trading ties with China in the 17th century. It is only fitting then that the grand finale of the toughest ocean race in the world should be in the picturesque town.

What's the race all about?

The VOR is the longest yacht race in the world. The 31,250 nautical miles that it covers is equal to eight times the length of the Great Wall of China or, to put it differently, equals ten trans-Atlantic crossings. The longest of the race's nine legs is 6,700 nautical miles.

The yacht for this year's race, the Volvo Open 70, was designed by experts specially commissioned by VOR for the event. All the competing yachts would have to match the design specifications laid out by VOR; the organisers will actually weigh and measure the boats prior to the flag-off.

The Volvo Open 70 will be 70.5 ft in length and tilt the scales at 12.3-13.8 tonnes. The mast at 103.3 ft, is one-tenth the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Despite being about 6.5 ft longer than the yacht used in the last VOR in 2001-02, the weight will be a whole tonne less this time thanks to the use of carbon fibre for the first time.

"The Volvo 70 is made of carbon fibre and has 62 per cent more sail area, which means more power," says Glenn Bourke, CEO, VOR. "To counterbalance the higher power, we gave more depth and more weight in the keel, yet this boat is lighter than the earlier one." Bourke was the competition and venue manager at the 2000 Sydney Olympics' yachting event and was also manager of the German team that won the last VOR. He spearheads operations for the latest VOR from his office in Whiteley, Hampshire.

The yacht can sail at speeds exceeding 41 miles per hour (65 kmph) and this is akin to driving a car at such speed on a windy country road, blindfolded with debris blocking the way, says the answer to an FAQ in the VOR official magazine.

There would be ten sailors on board and their endeavour is to travel as light as possible to increase speeds. "They go to such extents that they have open toilets on board to reduce weight," says Bourke. The Volvo Open 70 will, however, have closed toilets this time round.

Monitoring the activity on board will be ten cameras, seven of which are fixed and the rest mobile. These cameras with day/night shooting capability will continuously transmit images to the control room at Whiteley. The images are used as much to monitor the crew as to track their safety on the high seas. Not that anything much can be done anyway if something were to go wrong in the high seas. They would be too far away for the nearest help to arrive on time.

The crew will live in cramped conditions and there will be absolutely no privacy. There will be no fresh food on board and the crew will make do with frozen food and desalinated seawater. They will split into groups and rotate different duties amongst them. The duties are so rotated that they would get four hours on deck, four hours of sleep and will be on standby for four hours. In other words, they would be on duty round-the-clock.

Emergency medical kits are available on board and two members of the crew will be trained medics. This is apart from the round-the-clock support from the race medical team and a UK hospital reachable by satellite phone. Women have been part of the crew in the past and in this year's race the navigator of the Brazilian entry, Brasil 1, is Adrienne Cahalan, an Australian woman.

The winner is determined by a points system. The racecourse will have five landmarks as scoring gates and the boats will score points as they go past each of them. There will also be seven in-port races at various ports where again there are points to be won.

VOR 2005-06 has seven participating teams sponsored by various corporations but the star entry is Team Pirate from the US, which is sponsored by Walt Disney Corporation.

Team Pirate will also promote Walt Disney's new movie under production, Pirates of the Caribbean II — Dead Man's Chest, a sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean — The Curse of the Black Pearl. Their yacht is of course named `The Black Pearl' after the pirate ship in the movie.

Veteran sailor Paul Cayard who won the race in 1997-98 leads Team Pirate; Cayard is a seven-time world champion and carries an awesome reputation in the world of yacht racing.

Of the remaining six entries two are sponsored by ABN Amro, one by Ericsson, and one each by Brasil 1, Premier Challenge of Australia and Telefonica of Spain.

Pictures courtesy: Volvo Ocean Race

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