A Chance to Go Round the World, and Perhaps Round the Bend

Veteran skipper Ken Read will helm the Puma boat in the Volvo Ocean Race, which is scheduled to begin on Oct. 8 in Spain. (2002 Photo By Jack Smith -- Associated Press)

Ten workmen scampered around the deck, tools in hand, as we poked along. "That's the same as my whole race crew," Read said, counting heads and shaking his own with worry. "Oops, here comes number 11. That's an extra guy."

The hull design, by Spaniard Marcel Botin and South African Sean Carkeek, looks roughly similar to ABN Amro I, runaway winner last time, with a cantilevered, swinging keel, two lifting daggerboards up forward and twin rudders under the broad, powerful stern. But Read said refinements in design rules will make all the boats more powerful and faster than the last generation.

"We have a masthead jib [headsail] this time that's as big as Warwick, R.I.," he said with a chuckle. "With all that sail area, there's no such thing as light winds anymore."

Puma will announce the full race crew soon, but Read was willing to name a couple of key members, including the bowman, doubtless the most dangerous job on the boat. It's the bowman who gets hoisted 100 feet up the mast when things go wrong at the top, no matter how hard the wind is blowing, and who works at the heaving, half-submerged pointy end no matter how tumultuous the seas. Who's the pick?

"We're taking Jerry Kirby," Read said, naming the oldest bowman still working the grand prix circuit. At 52, Kirby would be better off at home, running his real estate construction firm, but Read said his fellow Rhode Islander, who worked the bow on Pirates of the Caribbean in the last Volvo, "Told me if I left the dock without him, he'd hunt me down wherever I was and kill me."

Read also named Briton Andrew Cape, a Volvo veteran, as navigator and Australian Chris Nicholson as watch captain. Nicholson, a world champion dinghy racer, "is the fastest driver I've ever seen," said Read, who was Dennis Conner's pick to helm Stars & Stripes in the 2000 and 2003 America's Cups. Overall, the Puma crew will have sailors from six nations.

The six other boats in the fleet include four from programs that are building and entering two boats each. Swedish Ericsson has five-time Olympic medalist Torben Grael at the helm of its top boat, which is designed by the last winning designer, Argentine Juan Kouyoumdjian. Spanish Alicante has veteran Bouwe Bekking, skipper on Movistar when it sank, running its "A" boat and Annapolis-based designer Bruce Farr drawing the lines.

As always, the Volvo will be about hull design, sail shapes, risk management, crew dynamics, luck, weather, courage and skill. With live reports pouring in via satellite communications, sailors around the world will be able to sit at their computers and share vicariously the exigencies of life on the knife at the far edges of the earth.

It's a sailing race for a change about boats and men, wild winds and open ocean. How refreshing!