Читать книгу The Proving Ground: The Inside Story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Boat Race - Bruce Knecht - Страница 14

LARRY ELLISON TOOK Sayonara’s wheel twenty minutes before the start—and disaster struck almost immediately. Four grinders, the muscular crewmen who cranked two bicycle pedal – like contraptions with their arms to provide the force needed to pull in the huge sails, realized it first. When Tony Rae, who was responsible for trimming the mainsail, wanted to let out the sail, he eased the line by letting it slip around the drum of a winch. When he wanted to pull the sail in, he needed help from the grinders, who worked the pedals, two to a station. The men and handles sometimes moved so rapidly that they looked as if they had become a single machine. But now, as they turned the pedals, which turned the winch drum by way of a driveshaft, the grinders heard something they shouldn’t have: a terrible crunching sound. Suddenly the pedals started to turn freely, obviously disengaged. In just twelve knots of wind, the driveshaft, which was made from carbon fiber, had shattered.

Ellison didn’t know what had happened, but he knew he had to continue focusing on steering, particularly when Dickson left his side to investigate the problem. Although Ellison didn’t show any reaction, he was worried. Things are breaking before we even get started, he said to himself. That’s a bad omen.

As soon as Dickson figured out what had happened, he reacted with the kind of blistering fury for which he was famous. “This is ridiculous and inexcusable!” he boomed. “This can’t happen! Our system has failed!” Though things break regularly on most boats, Dickson considered equipment failure on Sayonara unforgivable, except in the most extreme weather conditions. Old or new, everything was supposed to be repeatedly tested and inspected. If something broke in a relatively light wind, someone hadn’t done his job.

When Sayonara had been shipped to Sydney, it was accompanied by two forty-foot-long cargo containers. One was outfitted as an office and a well-equipped workshop, crammed full of tools and spare parts. The other carried the twenty-four-foot chase boat along with other gear. Shouting into a cellular phone, Dickson ordered the driver of the chase boat to rocket back to its on-land base station to fetch a replacement driveshaft. Powered by two ninety-horsepower outboard engines, the chase boat could travel at forty-five knots, but—Dickson belatedly realized—that wouldn’t be fast enough to get to the workshop and back to Sayonara before the ten-minute warning gun at 12:50 P.M., at which point off-yacht support was prohibited. Without the driveshaft, one of Sayonara’s three main winches would be useless. The crew would be forced to rely on a less powerful and awkwardly located winch in the pit of the cockpit, making it more difficult for Tony Rae to see the sail and control its trim.

Returning to his position near Ellison, Dickson told him, “We’ll have to trim the mainsail from the middle winch. You’re going to have to tack a bit more slowly to give the crew some extra time.”

“That’s going to make it harder to get ahead of the crowd,” said Ellison. “Maybe I should be more aggressive at the start to make sure we get out in front from the beginning.”

Still furious, Dickson nodded.

The start is often the most exciting part of a race—and it can be decisive. Races that are hundreds of miles long are sometimes won by just a few minutes. The first boats to get ahead enjoy uncongested water and air currents that aren’t blocked by other boats. The farther back they are in the fleet, the more yachts are forced to tack back and forth to avoid collisions. Every tack has a cost: it takes a minute or more for the crew to retune the sails and for the yacht to regain optimum speed.

A good start also provides an important emotional boost. Getting the most out of a yacht requires constant attention, an undying eagerness to raise and lower sails and to tweak dozens of lines that change the shape of the sails. The benefits from the constant recalibrating are often so slight as to be virtually imperceptible. When spirits are high, so is the motivation. No one complains about lugging another sail to the deck and folding up the old one. But if nothing seems to work, the mood sinks and no one works as hard. The fun is gone, and so is the point.

The start of the Hobart is particularly challenging. Most races that have a large number of boats have several, staggered starting times, each for a different class of yacht. The Hobart has just one starting time, even though the fleet includes a vast array of shapes and sizes, from maxis like Sayonara and Brindabella, which accelerate so quickly that they seem to have some sort of invisible propulsion system, to tubby thirty-five-foot sloops, which travel about half as fast. The experience level of each helmsman also varies, from America’s Cup veterans to weekend sailors, some of them terrified about setting out on their first Hobart.

The starting line was defined by a boat (from which the starting gun would be fired) at one end and a buoy at the other. Running north to south, the line was about half a mile long and stretched across almost the entire width of the harbor at one of its narrowest points. As Ellison guided Sayonara back and forth behind the line, the wind was blowing at just over ten knots from the northeast. Looking for openings, he felt as if he were driving an Indianapolis 500 car around the track while trying to avoid dozens of careening taxicabs.

With less than ten minutes to go before the start, Dickson pointed to another boat and said, “I think you should go above this yacht by at least twenty feet,” meaning that he wanted Ellison to turn closer to the source of the wind so Sayonara would pass on the upwind side of the other boat.

“I can do that, but do I have a choice? Maybe we should duck under him.”

“No, that would leave us in too much congestion. Your gap is above.”

On land Ellison rarely deferred to anyone, but he allowed Dickson to make many of the most important decisions on Sayonara. In fact, Ellison couldn’t even see much of what was in front of his boat because his view was obscured by sails. He had to rely on Joey Allen, who was perched at the bow and was using hand signals to send information about other boats.

After the gun signaling that five minutes remained before the start, every yacht attempted to close in on the line. It was as if a hundred pacing panthers were confined to an ever shrinking cage. They turned back and forth, testing one another, searching for an advantage, each trying to stake out territory. When there was just a minute left, Brad Butterworth, Sayonara’s tactician and one of its primary helmsmen, counted down the seconds, loud enough for Ellison and everyone in the cockpit to hear. Ellison’s eyes darted in every direction, searching for traps and openings in the impossibly concentrated field while also watching the wind’s direction and the shape of the sails.

Sayonara was close to the line. A bit too close. Tony Rae eased the mainsail so it spilled wind and Sayonara lost some of its speed. That meant Sayonara wouldn’t have a flying start, but at least it wouldn’t be stuck behind any other boats. With five seconds left, the grinders brought in the sails, and the boat surged forward.

A blast from a cannon—a replica of one that was on board Endeavour when Captain Cook reached Australia—announced the start of the race. Sayonara’s sails were brought in, and it crossed the line seconds later. There was screaming on many boats, but Ellison’s crew was almost silent as he executed a near perfect start.

Many yachtsmen assumed that Ellison’s money was the key to Sayonara’s success—and money certainly played a role. Ellison happily spent six-figure sums for a single regatta, replacing $50,000 sails the way tennis players buy a new can of balls. Sayonara sailed in only five or six major races a year, but since they were scattered all over the globe, the yacht had to be shipped between continents on cargo ships. For each trip, everything that was attached to the hull—the mast, rigging, winches, steering wheels—was removed and packed so that a kind of giant padded sock could be slipped around the boat. The hull was then lifted onto a ship, where it rested in a custom-made steel frame. The packing procedure required a week’s labor from six people—as did the reassembly at the other end. Bill Erkelens, a member of Sayonara’s sailing crew, and his wife, Melinda, who together worked as the boat’s full-time managers, oversaw the transportation. They also kept up-to-date with yachting regulations, arranged for the crew’s transportation, and took care of maintenance. It all cost money, and every month they sent a summary of expenses to one of Ellison’s assistants for his approval.

But the money represented only a small part of the story. Every maxi-yacht owner is rich. What set Sayonara apart from its peers was the quality of the crew, the way its members had learned to work together, and Ellison’s ability to retain them race after race. To some extent it was self-perpetuating: everyone likes being on the winning team. But the real key to Sayonara’s success lay in the degree to which its crewmen specialized in their jobs. On many boats, decisions about tactics and the trim of a sail are second-guessed as a matter of course. Second-guessing on Sayonara was unusual. Ellison had come to appreciate the skill of his crew, and he rarely overruled them.

Dickson encouraged crewmen to develop sharply defined roles—and to take total responsibility for them. Joey Allen, the bowman, also selected the equipment he used. Whenever a change was made to the rigging, Allen was consulted. If he wanted to move a fitting or try a different kind of pulley, Bill Erkelens would arrange for it. If Allen later wanted to go back to the old one, that was fine, too.

Immediately after the start, T. A. McCann, who was responsible for raising and lowering the sails in front of the mast, began providing commentary on the wind. Looking for ripples on the water, he tried to divine the velocity and direction of the wind that would be encountered over the next sixty seconds. Seeing where the breeze or a gust disturbed the surface of the water is easy, but judging the strength and direction of the wind, which many sailors call “pressure,” is an acquired skill of great subtlety.

“Steady pressure for the next twenty, and then we’re going to get a big puff,” T.A. called out. “Ten seconds to the puff. Ten, nine, eight …”

The goal was to help Ellison and the sail trimmers anticipate what would come next so as to create a seamless operation in which every change was reacted to rapidly and optimally. There was intelligence at every level. Sayonara’s grinders, most of them built like linebackers, may have looked as if they were selected only for their brawn, but they were all talented yachtsmen. Though they listened to T.A. and the sail trimmers, they also watched the wind and sails themselves, so they would be better prepared to act.

Communicating on a maxi-yacht is difficult, so Dickson insisted that anyone who didn’t have vital information to convey keep quiet. T.A. was the only crewman who was expected to do much talking, and even he tried to be economical, occasionally asking, “Am I talking too much?” A few minutes after the start, when someone on the rail shouted about an approaching gust, T.A. quickly shut him down. “Hey, I’ll make that call. Let’s relax. We’ve done this millions of times. Let’s stick with the system.”