Читать книгу The Proving Ground: The Inside Story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Boat Race - Bruce Knecht - Страница 12

ROB KOTHE’S ALARM clock sounded at 3:30 A.M. on Saturday morning. The owner of the Sword of Orion began the day by filling a mug with his favorite drink, Sustagen, a vitamin-fortified chocolate mix, into which he sprinkled a teaspoon of ground coffee beans. Walking into his study, he logged on to his computer and called up data from the same global weather models Kenn Batt and Brett Gage were studying. Kothe had been doing the same thing every day for several weeks, and with good reason: in ocean racing, judgments about where the winds and currents are strongest are pivotal.

A tall and gangly fifty-four-year-old, Kothe didn’t have much hair on the top of his head, although he did have a broad snow-white mustache and a goatee, which extended out over a long, pointy chin. He was relatively new to sailing. He had bought his first boat in 1997—the year he raced his first Hobart—but he believed he could make up for his lack of experience with the same sort of relentless striving that had made him a successful entrepreneur. Understanding the weather was the area where he believed he could make the biggest contribution to his crew’s race, and he spent the next three hours comparing the models, printing out charts and data while straining the largest of the coffee particles from his drink through his teeth.

It was obvious that he hadn’t been sailing for long. When he tried to pass himself off as an old salt, splicing nautical terms into the conversation, he ended up sounding more like a newcomer who was trying a bit too hard. The overall impression was that of a mad professor, and for that reason many CYC members called him Kooky Owner, or simply K.O. Some, in fact, had never heard his real name. For a while he tried to get the young men he recruited for his crew to stop using the name; later, he sought, again unsuccessfully, to alter the meaning by signing e-mails as “Kompetitive Owner.” The Sword’s crew eventually shortened the name to Kooky.

Kooky had an abiding hunger for the kind of glory that winning the Hobart could bring. “I was the smallest kid in school until I was nine, and I felt bad about that,” he said more than four decades later. “It gave me a point to prove.” He grew up in Eden, a port city south of Sydney where his father worked as an accountant for many of the fishing fleets based there. Although he didn’t sail as a child, Kooky spent a lot of time hanging around the docks and he remembered following the Hobart races. Two days before the 1954 race, when Kooky was eight, his parents gave him a new radio. “I listened to the whole race. Back then I could recite the names of everyone who had won.”

Kooky had been deeply committed to adding his name to that list ever since.

Kooky was fundamentally different from other skippers. Whereas most of them had been sailing for many years, he hoped to go from novice to Hobart winner almost immediately. And although sailing is a team sport, Kooky, who knew less about sailing than everyone else on his crew, wasn’t a natural leader. A true entrepreneur, most of his achievements had come from individual pursuits rather than group efforts, and his drive wasn’t matched by a talent for managing others. For example, after he hired Darren Senogles, a twenty-eight-year-old sailor known as Dags, to take care of the boat, Kooky called him so frequently that Dags told him, “If you keep calling me, I’ll never have a chance to get anything done.”

When he recruited his crew, Kooky didn’t mislead anyone about his sailing credentials. Instead, he talked about how he had flown gliders in airborne regattas over Australian deserts when he was working as a pharmacist near Canberra in the 1970s. “In gliding, you figure out what the wind is doing, and you win by learning how to take advantage of it, just like in sailing,” he said. “It’s the solo version of the same thing.” He also described gliding as an extremely competitive sport, recalling that one of his friends had been killed in a collision and claiming that midair contact sometimes left planes with tire marks on their wings.

Since those pharmacist days, Kooky’s career had evolved through a sequence of oddly logical stages. Pharmacology got him involved in animal tranquilizers, which led to tranquilizer guns. His understanding of the propulsion component inspired him to manufacture lifeline-throwing guns, which he profitably supplied to navies and merchant fleets around the world. After going through a divorce in 1992, Kooky decided his businesses were doing well enough that he could finally find the time to pursue the Hobart. For a couple of years, he crewed on other people’s boats, but since his dream had everything to do with winning the race on his own yacht, he soon bought a forty-foot sloop and joined the CYC.

Before the 1997 Hobart, he told his crew—which included Dags—that he would buy a better boat if they did well. They did, and the day after they finished the race, Kooky, always an early riser, began stalking the docks to shop for a new boat at 5:00 A.M. Before the morning was over, he had decided to buy Brighton Star for $220,000. It had originally been launched as the Sword of Orion, and Kooky decided to restore its former name.

The Sword’s shape was very different from that of classic sailing yachts. Its bow dropped straight down from the deck to the water. The back half of the boat was strikingly broad, creating a large cockpit area eight feet across. A seven-foot-diameter steering wheel extended from one side to the other, enabling helmsmen to have the broadest possible perspective. Like Sayonara and most of the fastest racing yachts, the hull was composed of strong but lightweight skins on the inside and outside, surrounding an interior of foam. The Sword’s skins were made of Kevlar, a synthetic material so strong that it’s used to make bulletproof vests.

Kooky went to fairly extreme measures to improve the boat and its crew. The Sword came with a handsome barometer, which was housed in a brass case; Kooky replaced it with a plastic one to eliminate a couple of pounds of weight. He had hinges moved from one side of the cabinet doors to the other because he thought shifting the weight of the hinges toward the front of the boat might improve the yacht’s handicap rating. If something broke in a race, he was pleased: “Now we can get a better one” was his usual reaction.

Beyond a demanding racing schedule—at least two races and one practice sail every week, sometimes with a professional sailing coach on board—Kooky used e-mails to badger the crew to be on the boat on time and even to exercise more and lose weight. “I’ve been looking closely at crew commitment,” he wrote in an all-crew message a month before the Hobart. “If you want to be on the Hobart boat, this is the commitment needed: 1) You will need to be available for all races from this weekend. No weekends off. Not for discussion. However, there will be a maximum of two midweek practice sessions, possibly only one. 2) Fitness. If you are not already, start running or go to the gym. Cut the alcohol and eat better. Lard is a penalty. 3) Smoking. Last weekend I saw cigarette ash land on sails and I suffered a coughing fit from cigarette smoke. There will be no smoking during short races, from the ten-minute gun. Before and between races, smoking sites will be per long races. In long races, there will be no smoking upwind, ahead of the traveler. In long races, there will be no smoking downwind, behind the cockpit. If you are not able to meet these conditions tell me now while you still have time to find a place on another boat going south.”

Kooky didn’t know any other way. “I’m just an intensely competitive person,” he would say. “I don’t do anything by halves.”

The Hobart has two kinds of winners. Larry Ellison and George Snow hoped to make it to Hobart first to win “line honors”: to be the first to cross the finish line. Others, including Kooky, aspired to win the race based on “adjusted” or “corrected” time. As in golf, every yacht is given a handicap to make up for its different size, weight, and sails. Although Kooky brought an uneven set of skills to his campaign, he rated his chances at winning on corrected time at one in six.

After he finished checking the weather information on his computer, Kooky took a cab for the fifteen-minute ride to the CYC, where he arrived just after eight o’clock. The clubhouse and the docks behind it were already packed with sailors, spectators, and journalists. Kooky’s first objective was to find Dags, who in addition to preparing the boat was one of the core members of the crew. Dags could hardly have been more different from his boss. While Kooky was physically and socially awkward, Dags had the wiry body of a long-distance runner and was a gifted athlete who exuded easygoing personal warmth. Though he looked like an up-and-coming corporate attorney when he wore his wire-rimmed glasses, when he was drinking beer with his contemporaries, he was exuberantly playful and seemed, if anything, younger than his age. But Dags managed the Sword like a seasoned executive, systematically testing equipment and attending to his “to do” list. He was also uncommonly generous. After a long day of sailing during a weeklong regatta, he stayed on the boat much longer than anyone else, cleaning up and getting ready for the next day. By the time he arrived at the house where the crew were staying, he had missed dinner. No one had thought to save any lasagna for him; rather than complaining, he began washing the dishes.

Like Kooky, Dags had high ambitions for the Sword, but the nature of his aspirations was fundamentally different. Dags was less interested in glory than in becoming a great sailor for its own sake. He was a bowman, responsible for changing the sails in front of the mast. Because the bow is more affected by the motion of waves than any other part of the boat, the job requires acrobatic balance and enough dexterity to manipulate a complicated array of lines, sails, and equipment. Dags was a natural.

He hoped the Sword would be a stepping-stone to even more competitive yachts. It was not his first boat: he started racing to Hobart when he was just fourteen, and he had already competed in ten races. Now Dags wanted to find out whether he had the skills to sail at the very highest level—in the Whitbread or the America’s Cup or on a boat like Sayonara—and he was willing to sacrifice a lot to get there. A few months earlier, he had quit working at his father’s home-building company because it was getting in the way.

Dags sailed on the Sword almost in spite of its owner. There’s often an implicit bargain between owners and crewmen. Talented sailors want to be on high-performance yachts, which are necessarily expensive. By providing a first-class boat and covering the ongoing expense of acquiring new sails and the latest in performance-enhancing equipment, owners attract crewmen who can’t afford their own boats. The other part of the equation is that much of the recognition, as well as the trophies, goes to the owners.

“He’s just a glory hound—that’s all he wants,” Dags said of Kooky. But if the glory came from racing victories, Dags would also benefit. A few months before the Hobart, the Sword was the surprise winner of a major regatta. If it continued to do well, Dags would be invited to join an even better yacht.

Still, better than anyone, Dags understood that Kooky wasn’t a perfect skipper and that the owner’s lack of experience and follow-through were problematic. A couple of weeks earlier, Dags had asked every member of the crew to help provision the boat with food and drink and various other supplies. Kooky’s task had been to refill the propane tank that was used for cooking, but when the two met on the dock on the morning of the race, Dags wasn’t surprised to learn that the tank was still sitting in a locker, virtually empty. That’s typical, Dags said to himself. Here we are, with just a few hours before the start, and I have to run around trying to fill the propane tank instead of checking everything on the boat one last time.

Larry Ellison paid whatever it took to get the world’s best sailors on Sayonara. Kooky avoided making outright payments; Dags was paid to take care of the boat, but he sailed on his own time. Like many owners, however, Kooky used his buying power with marine suppliers to bolster his team. A sailmaker named Andrew Parkes started sailing on the Sword after Kooky told him, “I’m going to be buying a lot of sails, and I would like you to be part of my crew.”

A month before the Hobart, Kooky had met Glyn Charles, an Olympic sailor from Britain, and asked him to join the crew. A boyishly handsome thirty-three-year-old with a mop of curly dark hair, Glyn had been in Australia for several weeks working as a sailing coach. Since he hoped to represent Britain in the Sydney Olympics, he was also spending time sailing small boats back and forth across the harbor in order to develop an intimate understanding of local wind patterns. Small boats were Glyn’s passion. They were what attracted him to sailing, and unlike many sailors who move to bigger boats as their skills increase, Glyn reveled in the total control he could have over a small one. At the time, he was ranked fourth in the world for the Star Class, a twenty-two-and-a-half-foot two-man boat.

Although he had been planning to leave Australia on December 22 so he could spend Christmas in England with his family and girlfriend, he agreed to meet Kooky at the CYC bar ten days before the race. Kooky loved the idea of adding an Olympic-quality helmsman to his crew. Glyn didn’t like ocean racing, in part because he was prone to seasickness, but he was tempted: he could add the Hobart to his sailing résumé—and also make some money. He asked for one thousand pounds. Kooky started out saying that he couldn’t pay an outright fee. While it was permitted in the class in which Sayonara sailed, it wasn’t in the Sword’s. A little later, though, he offered to reimburse Glyn for various expenses, including his flight to England, and to pay about a thousand pounds for some “consulting work.”

Glyn was still torn. The Hobart sounded a lot like the Fastnet Race, Britain’s best-known ocean race, which starts from the Isle of Wight and goes to the southwest tip of Ireland and then back to England. Glyn had sailed in the Fastnet, and had hated it. On the other hand, he was having a hard time turning sailing into a profession, so he ultimately accepted Kooky’s offer.

But two days before the race, Glyn thought he had made a terrible mistake. He was hit by a stomach virus, and all he could think about was the misery of seasickness. Even though he hadn’t left land, he already felt seasick. When Kooky heard that Glyn was ill, he phoned and told him, “You’ve got to go to the doctor and get it fixed. If it’s a virus, it’s going to go right through the crew.”

Glyn replied, “It’s only food.”

“I hope you’re right. If it’s food, you’ll be all right—but you’ve got to see a doctor.” Afraid that Glyn wasn’t taking him seriously, Kooky added, “If by eight o’clock tonight you haven’t told me that you’ve gotten clearance from a doctor, you’re off the boat. Simple as that. I can’t risk it.”

Later that day, Glyn called Kooky and said he’d been to a doctor and that he was okay.

On the morning of the race, Kooky asked Glyn about the specifics of what the doctor had said. Glyn had a confession to make: he hadn’t actually seen a doctor. Instead, he had talked by phone to a friend who was a physician. Kooky was annoyed, but Glyn, in part because of his enthusiastic mood, convinced him that he felt much better.

By midmorning, the docks were bustling with last-minute activity. Several yachtsmen were high above the decks of their boats, sitting in bosun’s chairs—small, slinglike seats suspended from the tops of masts—checking the rigging. Other sailors were disconnecting electrical cords, removing flags from the tops of masts, folding sails, and off-loading half-empty bottles of wine. Some crews were huddling in their cockpits with maps and the rules for the race. Others were putting on their team shirts and hats and asking passersby to take pictures. Some of the yachtsmen were nervous, but none of them showed it.

Before the Sword left the dock to head toward the starting line, Kooky joined the rest of the ten-member crew for a round of rum and Cokes at the CYC’s main bar. Sailors are renowned for their capacity to drink, and theirs may be the only sport in which having a drink or two before the start of competition is not merely acceptable but, for some, de rigueur. Although it was still morning, the bar was packed—and the mood was raucous, like a Saturday night in a college pub. Since girlfriends and wives were part of the crowd, there wasn’t much discussion about the ominous weather forecast. Instead, most of the talk was about Christmas Day activities and the impossible pressures of simultaneously preparing for the race and celebrating the holiday. Beyond lighthearted ribbing and challenges, there was a steady chorus of “good luck, mate” and “see you in Hobart.” Kooky—who, like skippers of many of the other most competitive yachts, had banned alcohol from the Sword—explained his morning cocktail with a pharmacist’s sense of humor. “We might as well have a small sedative to settle our nerves.” Dags had two.

On most yachts, the skipper delivers a pep talk before the start of the race. After the Sword’s crew assembled back on the boat, the only inspirational words came from Steve Kulmar, another relatively recent addition to the crew. Although he was brought on as a principal helmsman, Kulmar, who ran a successful Sydney advertising agency, had a far more expansive idea as to the role he would play on the Sword. Indeed, since he considered himself the yacht’s most experienced crewman, he expected to make most of the big decisions. That Kooky was the skipper seemed to Kulmar an irrelevant detail.

Kulmar always provoked strong reactions. People either loved him or hated him; he left no room for middle ground. A solidly built forty-six-year-old with closely cropped hair that was halfway to gray, he looked a bit like a stern version of Frank Sinatra. While Kulmar’s eyes weren’t blue, they were distinctive, usually so wide open that they looked as if they were about to burst from their sockets. In the office, where he wore Armani suits and his secretary served him oversized cups of cappuccino, Kulmar’s demeanor veered between toughness and vulnerability. He could be charming and solicitous, qualities that helped his company attract a blue-chip list of clients. The way he hesitated in the middle of a thought made him sound like an intellectual, yet his haircut and intensity gave him the appearance of a military officer and a man who was always on the verge of erupting into a tantrum if anything went wrong. Those tantrums weren’t pretty: Kulmar had a towering ego, and even his closest friends complained about the way he tried to seize control of every situation and how he stamped his feet when he failed to get his way.

Before the Sword left the dock, Kulmar addressed the crew as if it were his own. “The yacht is in great shape. We have an excellent crew, and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t win as long as we push the boat as hard as we can.” His monologue included references to his past victories. In fact, he did have a great record. As a child, he had won several Australian and world championships on twelve- and eighteen-foot boats. As an adult, he had sailed in seven Fastnets and seventeen Hobarts, three of them on boats that won on corrected time. But Dags thought Kulmar’s credential wielding was more than simple egotism. He thought it was part of an effort by Kulmar to take over the boat. And that, Dags thought, was deeply troubling.

Managing the crew of a racing vessel can be complicated. There needs to be a clear line of authority, but decisions must be made fluidly, based on a foundation of mutual understanding about strengths and weaknesses, methods that work and ones that don’t, a common vocabulary as well as unspoken conventions for coordinating complicated procedures in sometimes challenging conditions. There’s too much going on during a race for the skipper to make all the decisions, and no one person can be the expert on everything. In addition, some of the most important calls—which course to take, what sails to fly—can’t be made with scientific certainty. Despite an increased reliance on high tech, most decisions in sailing are still made by human beings. The key to a successful boat is a crew’s ability to express opinions freely, without worrying about potential insults or hurt feelings, and to reach consensus rapidly.

When, late in the game, Kooky recruited Kulmar and Glyn, he was more focused on the individual skills they would bring than on the effect they would have on the rest of the crew. After months of racing as a group, the original crewmen had gotten to know one another and had become comfortable working together. The addition of Kulmar and Glyn changed things.

Dags, who had sailed with Kulmar in the past, had done everything he could to highlight the downside of bringing him on board. “He’s a fantastic helmsman, but he thinks he’s more than that—he thinks he’s a god,” Dags told Kooky. “When he steps on the boat, he’s going to act like he owns it.”

That had a ring of truth to Kooky. When Kooky and Kulmar met at a pub to talk about sailing the Sword, Kulmar was half an hour late. He then enumerated his sailing accomplishments, doing so in such elaborate detail that Kooky had little time to talk about the Sword’s existing crew. Indeed, Kulmar’s tendency to play up his victories had made him unpopular in many yachting circles, where understatement and modesty is the expected norm, but Kooky, who thought his crew was short of top-notch helmsmen, pursued him anyway. For his part, Kulmar left the pub convinced that Kooky was committed to winning the Hobart, but not experienced enough to know how. Rather than viewing that combination as a negative, Kulmar thought it would enable him to run the boat without having to bear the expense of owning it.

The potential for tension between Kulmar and the rest of the crew became apparent even before the Sword left the dock. Kulmar said the crew should adopt a two-watch system in which half the crew was on duty at any time. The others had already agreed to a three-watch system in which one team would sail the boat while the second was on call, relaxing either on deck or below, and the third was free to climb into their bunks and sleep. In a two-watch system, half the crew would be on deck, changing and trimming the sails. The other half would be completely off-duty at any given time. With a three-watch system, it would be easier to push the boat harder, but the crew would get less rest.

“I’ve never done a Hobart with a three-watch system,” Kulmar said. “It’s just not required.”

“No,” said Carl Watson, a balding, forty-five-year-old yachting industry consultant who had been sailing on the Sword for close to a year, “we’ve already decided on three watches.”

Watson was another crewman who had warned Kooky against adding Kulmar and Glyn. He realized that the Sword could use two first-class drivers, but he didn’t like the idea of adding anyone—whether it was Kulmar or an Olympian—to the crew at the last minute. “Glyn might be a fantastic helmsman,” Watson said to Kooky a few days before the race, “but it’s a late call. He doesn’t know anything about the boat—he’s never been on it—and we haven’t even met him.”

Standing on the dock, angry that Kulmar was trying to impose changes, Watson refused to give any ground. “We’re having three watches. There’s a good chance we’re going to get some bad weather, so we need to have more of the crew on duty.”

A little later, Kulmar and Watson had another disagreement. “What’s this?” Kulmar asked, pointing to a large bag that obviously contained a spare mainsail. “We don’t want to take two mains. It’s nothing but extra weight.”

“Yes, we do,” Watson said. “We’re taking it. We’ve already made the decision.”

“This is bullshit,” Kulmar thundered. “It weighs far too much. It’s stupid. I’ve done more Hobarts than anyone on this boat—and it doesn’t make any fucking sense to take two mains.”

“I’ve done exactly the same number of Hobarts as you,” Watson said. “Seventeen.”

“I’ve won more.”

Watson wasn’t about to back down. Like Dags, he thought Kulmar was mounting a one-man takeover, and thought the only way to stop him was to confront him at every turn. “Your job is to steer the boat,” Watson said. “Nothing else. You’re not the skipper.”

Yachting is full of hard-charging men who are used to having their own way. On many yachts, crewmen regularly scream at one another, and it sometimes seems as if tensions will boil over into ugly confrontations; the harsh words, however, are usually deceptive. The shouting and cursing is typically about small things—the need to raise a sail faster or clean up a mess in the galley—and the outbursts are quickly forgotten. Watson, whose main role on the Sword was to trim the mainsail, wasn’t surprised by Kulmar’s aggressive behavior, but that didn’t make him any less angry as he walked down the dock. Kulmar’s attempt to assume control was a serious matter, and Kooky was the only person who could resolve it.

After hearing from Watson, Kooky agreed to tell Kulmar that they were going to carry two mainsails, but Kooky was unable to decide what to do about what Watson said next: “You have to tell Kulmar that he’s not the skipper, that he’s not going to be making the decisions—or we’re going to have a real problem.”