Starving crews and hot women—that’s sailing entertainment

The autumn of 2001 was prime time for fans of adventure sailing. Three grand sailing adventures—attempts to break the west to east Atlantic and New York to Melbourne sailing speed records and the Volvo Ocean Race—played simultaneously for audiences “watching” on the Internet. The records were broken in fine fashion, but the first two legs of the Volvo race, which features eight 60-foot boats sailing 32,000 miles around the world in increments of eight legs, provided the best entertainment.

There was the expected drama—competition so close boats were crossing tacks after thousands of miles of racing, boat speeds in excess of 25 knots in frightful conditions, flooding compartments, lost steering, serious illness, injuries including cracked ribs and vertebrae suffered by star circumnavigator Grant Dalton, who was thrown so violently when his boat dropped off a wave that he demolished the galley (his injuries were quite serious; the damage to the boat not as bad as it sounds—the galley on a Volvo 60 consists of a single burner on gimbals).

But there was also a surprising element of burlesque. A boat named djuice provided this by arriving in Cape Town, South Africa, at the finish of the first leg with—no kidding—a starving crew.

At a time well into the post Space Age millennium, with a budget of millions of dollars and computers to predict virtually everything, djuice managed to pull a Magellan and actually run out of food. There’s nothing funny about starving, but this was so goofy it could have been a Monty Python skit.

The crew was put on survival rations for days before the end of the 37-day passage. A sailor complained in an e-mail message of having to subsist on barely enough noodles “to fill a tooth.” When the boat arrived in Cape Town, crewmembers were so malnourished they were not allowed to eat the pizza and steak they had fantasized about, but instead were given a liquid concoction to restore their bodies during a recovery that took up most of the 10-day layover.

When Ferdinand Magellan ran out of food nearly 500 years ago during the first circumnavigation of the world, his crew was at least able to gnaw on leather mast fittings. The carbon fiber rigs of the Volvo 60s, unfortunately, don’t provide similar nourishment, and they’re the devil on teeth.

The brain (?) trust of djuice cut it close on food to save weight, of course. Freeze-dried food isn’t heavy; the Volvo boats don’t carry weighty liquid to reconstitute it—they make water. So what was the performance payoff from keeping, say, 50 pounds of disgusting but nutritious freeze-dried meals off of a 30,000-pound boat? Well, djuice, a well-financed Norwegian effort with a much respected crew, finished the leg in seventh place, second from last.

Speaking of last, the boat that took that place in the first leg figured in another entertaining sidelight of the Volvo spectacle. This developed when an Internet journalist fired a girl-bashing broadside at the skipper and crew of Amer Sports Too, the only boat in the fleet with women on board, in fact with only women on board.

In an editorial published by the madforsailing Web site, a writer named Peter Bentley asserted that the boat’s disappointing performance was a result of the women goofing off. This finding, he wrote, was based on messages and pictures from the boat that “seem to indicate that the pedal is not quite so far down to the metal” as on other boats and, get this, data indicating that the interior temperature on Amer Sports Too was higher than on any other boat.

Yikes, too warm below! That has to be a damning piece of intelligence, but what does it mean? That the thermostat on the diesel heater was set decadently high? That too many crewmembers were below knitting when they should have been sailing? That women’s bodies are hotter than men’s (no comment)?

I have my own theory about what set off Bentley and those who supported him, some in Neanderthal fashion, in letters to web sites: The women were showing alarming signs of enjoying sailing in one of the most grueling sailboat races of them all.

Certainly the men couldn’t be accused of any like that. Reports from crewmembers of the male boats (a certain amount of e-mail traffic is required by the rules to sustain interest in the race) began as a litany of complaint and coalesced into a steady whine: it’s too cold; it’s too wet (this from professional sailors collecting hefty paychecks to suffer a bit); we’re seasick; the food is lousy (it could be worse, as we’ve seen); and this gem—wet clothing and flatulence make it smell bad below.

Meanwhile, Liz Wardley of Amer Sports Too had the audacity to write that when she saw that snow had fallen on her deck, her first experience with the white stuff, she was so excited she threw snowballs at her watch captain.

Bentley quoted the message verbatim, then asked, “Is this serious racing?”

A better question might be, Is this serious journalism?

A claim that skipper Lisa McDonald and her crew (collectively referred to as “the girls” on madforsailing), including the proven, tough competitor Katie Pettibone, entered the Volvo race to cruise around the world by the delightful Southern Ocean route can hardly be taken seriously. It should be taken as a retrograde joke of the kind men used to tell about women drivers and still do about female blondes.

The story of the women’s boat is that, many months after other Volvo teams were organized and sailing, McDonald, a Whitbread Race and America’s Cup veteran, took a boat that had been rejected by another team and at the last minute put together an organization and crew. Would men in similar circumstances be doing better? No one knows, but I doubt they would be having their cabin temperature scrutinized as evidence of goofing off.

The women aren’t winning, but they aren’t whining either; they’re are out there competing in conditions that would scare the pants off their critics.

On the record-setting front, Steve Fossett’s 125-foot catamaran PlayStation rode the benign front side of a powerful weather system across the Atlantic (2,925 nautical miles) in 4 days, 17 hours, and 28 minutes, almost two days faster than the old sailing record, and only a day and a few hours slower than the steamship record set by the S.S. United States in 1952.

The 53-foot catamaran Great American II, sailing by Rich Wilson and Bill Biewenga, had tough sailing but managed to beat the record of the clipper ship Mandarin by 28 hours over the 15,000-mile course.

For the record, both boats had ample food and all-boy crews.