Show Boats

ABN Amro One sails first under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in the Volvo Ocean Race. The six competing vessels in the round-the-world race will make a stop in Baltimore and Annapolis. (Art Baltrotsky for The Washington Post)

Imagine an eight-month-long Formula One race in cars without windshields, roofs or seat belts. Imagine that the unmarked track is not 500 miles but 36,000 miles long, crisscrossed with speed bumps and pitted with bone-wrenching potholes. Imagine the pit crew sleeping -- when they can -- in four-hour shifts, worried not about changing a simple flat tire in a stationary pull-off but lunging at and hauling in sheared-off and whipping rubber in a sudden squall while the vehicle bucks and shudders.

Imagine the drivers fending off sunburn and praying for wind one week and ducking torrential rain and winds of up to 80 mph the next, and dodging hail and icebergs after that. Add in that the crew of 10 or 11 has to share a camper-size kitchen and only one toilet -- a severe lack of head room, so to speak -- and may have only a single change of clothing in their bags.

And finally consider that these boats -- for so these "race cars" are -- are built for sailing in deep water but must also negotiate regions as notorious as the doldrums, the Bermuda Triangle, Cape Horn and the Chesapeake Bay, which the official race Web site describes as "120 miles of flat, tidal water, ring-fenced with muddy shoals, peppered with crab pot markers and bedeviled by light and fluky winds," not to mention shallows and the occasional gale, and you have a sense of what crewing in a round-the-world sailing race is like.

The 2005-06 Volvo Ocean Race (known until 2001 as the Whitbread), which, like the Olympics and World Cup soccer, is staged only every four years, pits a half-dozen light, ultra-swift and daringly exposed 70-foot-long boats against the Earth's restless waters and uncertain weather, competing technology and mechanics, and each human other.

For the next two weeks, these high-strung, high-performance vessels, which took off on the first leg of the contest Nov. 12, are on display, at rest and in action, at festivals in Baltimore and Annapolis. On May 4, the whole panoply of sail will be on view as the fleet parades from the Inner Harbor to Annapolis for that city's Maritime Heritage Festival. Area enthusiasts will have an even more exciting vantage point if they participate in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge run or walk May 7, when the fleet leaves Annapolis headed to a point at the mouth of the Severn River about a half-mile above Thomas Point Light and heads back to the Bay Bridge before turning south to the Atlantic for the race into New York Harbor.

The six still-viable entries are the American Pirates of the Caribbean, named for the Disney mega-hit film and part of a publicity campaign for the sequel, which opens at the same time as the race ends (it flies a skull and crossbones flag); the Swedish entry Ericsson; the Brazilian Brasil 1; the Spanish movistar; and the Dutch double entry, ABN Amro One and Two. A seventh boat, the Australian Brunel, withdrew after the second leg with cash and mechanical troubles but is being taken by freighter to Baltimore to make the last four legs.

Obviously, this is no race for amateurs. Ericsson skipper John Kostecki, who won the last Volvo, took his first world championship at age 18. His team collectively has 25 Whitbread/Volvo races and 33 round-the-globe races to their credit, which is not even the most among the teams. ABN Amro One skipper Mike Sanderson won the 1993-94 race and is generally considered to have put his boat pretty safely in the lead.

Pirates of the Caribbean may be part of one of the most expensive public relations campaigns in history -- it's estimated that purchasing and crewing a Volvo 70 costs as much as $25 million, not to mention the Pirate crew's designer duds by Z Zegna -- but Disney isn't playing this just for show: Skipper Paul Cayard won the 1997-98 Volvo and has placed in seven world championships, two Olympics and five America's Cup contests. The 11 crew members, from seven countries, count five Volvo wins among them. (Plans originally called for the stars of the movie "Pirates," Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, to take turns aboard ship; although that hasn't panned out, there are persistent hints of possible star sightings in Baltimore.)

Even so, crew members are learning on the job. The Volvo Open 70 Offshore Sailboats, to give them their full name, are 10 feet longer than their predecessors and 25 percent more powerful and are capable of making perhaps 40 knots, about 46 mph. As Britt Ward of Farr Yacht Design, the Annapolis firm that designed four of the entries, put it, "These boats are so much more powerful, and they're just that much more dangerous." Designed using computer technology and virtual imaging that even the Disney sponsors must have admired, the 70s are on the cutting edge of shipbuilding technology.

They are also on the cutting edge of communications technology, which has increased both safety and public access. Each boat is fitted with a Global Positioning System device and extensive Internet connections as well as virtual links to a medical staff the likes of which many injured and infected sailors could never have conceived.

The communications links also benefit crews in mechanical fashion. When the Pirates crew reported water seeping in around the keel, skipper Cayard was able to photograph and transmit images of the area to the Annapolis offices of Farr Yacht Design and hold two days of video conferences with staff that confirmed the hull was structurally sound. On a personal level, too, GPS has remade the seagoing life: One crew member has shared in the birth of a child, and another is expecting a similar celebration before race's end.

For the benefit of sailing fans, crew members and skippers are able to post online reports and photos of the daily action; supply voice data interviews for the BBC and Voice of America, among other networks; and even respond (occasionally) to e-mail.