Riding on the crest of a wave

There is unprecedented Irish involvement in the current Volvo round-the-world yacht race, reports Lorna Siggins, Marine Correspondent

Wet, wet, wet. Soaked and sore in every joint, every bone. High on four-hour naps, caught in between watches when icebergs loom like leviathans and screaming winds taunt, and violent waves crash against the fragile membrane that is the hull of your boat.

And it is fragile. It is all that protects you from oblivion in the Southern Ocean. If you go overboard in these latitudes, you are on your own.

After days of freezing temperatures and long-lived-in thermal gear, the gradual rise in temperature comes as a painful shock. Excruciatingly so, as chilblains and frostbite injuries sustained in the sub-zero zone begin to warm up. The worst is repetitive salt chafe, which induces a horrible rash, while cracked hands aggravated by salt water add to the misery.

That wasn't quite my experience, given I wasn't under sail in the Southern Ocean five years ago. I enjoyed the relative, if still turbulent, "luxury" of steam, on a Russian ice-breaker bound for the Antarctic Peninsula. The Professor Molchanov was delivering the small wooden replica lifeboat used by the South Aris/Irish Shackleton expedition in 1997.

For several Irish participants in the prestigious Volvo Ocean Race, Southern Ocean suffering was part of a way of life in the past month. Before sighting Cape Horn and heading up to Rio de Janeiro just over a week ago, Justin Slattery (28), of Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, had got his first taste of the harsh environment on board the Australian entry, Team NewsCorp. But his crewmate, Gordon Maguire (40), of Howth, Co Dublin, has done this four times, a veteran of round-the-world yacht races.

Why? "It scares the living daylights out of you, and that's one of the reasons," Maguire said late last week, speaking to The Irish Times from Rio de Janeiro where the teams are resting after completing the fourth leg. "We're not foolhardy, we do have radar and all the electronic and safety equipment, but it is an adventure in incredibly varied conditions - ranging from ice and constant storms to heat exhaustion and sunstroke as we move up on the next leg towards the Equator."

Team NewsCorp is one of eight yachts participating in the 32,700-nautical-mile challenge, which involves 123 days at sea and nine months away on nine legs in all. The 12 crew on board each of the 19.6-metre Volvo 60 ya-chts set out from Southampton last September, and finish up in Kiel, northern Germany, in June. Most of them, like Maguire and Slattery, are professional sailors. The race is demanding in every sense - even food aboard is limited to 900 grammes a day, and sleep can never last more than a four-hour watch.

Also participating are Damien Foxall of Co Kerry, on Tyco and Dublin-born Aussie, Noel "Nitro" Drennan on the Illbruck Challenge, currently in first place overall.

Foxall's boat experienced a smashed rudder just a couple of days after leaving Cape Town, South Africa, on the second leg to Sydney, and had to retire temporarily. Drennan's crew overcame a near sinking on the first night out of Cape Town.

As Winkie Nixon, contributor to Afloat magazine, says, the Irish interest this year is "unprecedented". Illbruck Challenge was built in Germany by Killian Bushe of Crosshaven, Co Cork, and has had Ian Moore of Carrickfergus on its navigating team. John Mordaunt of Dublin was drafted in to crew on Norway's entry, Djuice. The women's boat, Amer Sports Too has an Irish link, as Willemien van Hoove of the Netherlands has been working with Met Éireann and sailing from Howth.

There's even an Irish involvement in the participants' official clothing. Dubarry of Ballinasloe, Co Galway, secured the title of "official footwear supplier" in the face of "stiff competition", according to its marketing director, Michael Walsh.

Gordon Maguire, who is generally regarded as this island's most experienced round-the-world yachtsman, is on Team NewsCorp. He described conditions on the fourth leg from Auckland to Rio as the worst he had ever experienced in the Southern Ocean. The vessel headed south to the 61 degree latitude, and witnessed far more ice than anticipated.

While the largest iceberg was about "as big as Ireland's Eye", it was the small "growlers" that proved most dangerous. On radio, they heard reports that scientific stations on the Antarctic peninsula were running short of supplies, as a heatwave had rendered the airstrips for ski-planes on delivery runs impassable. "Obviously, climate change is having a dramatic effect," he said.

"You can see the big bergs on the radar, but at night when you are trying to make speed, you have to rely on your eyes for the minor ones and it can be quite terrifying," Justin Slattery said. "On an average watch, you'd see five to six of them, and the small ones just appear out of the blackness like breaking surf." The vessel hit a growler at 21 knots, and the crew dived below, but it sustained no damage, apart from on the rigging - or so the crew thought. "Just when we thought the hard stuff was over, we came round Cape Horn with the spinnaker up at 20 to 22 knots and the rudder snapped," Slattery recalled. "We had just moved into second place, and we had to rig up the emergency rudder. We dropped back to fourth, and it was devastating at the time."

Slattery spent the early 1990s crewing with private owners in the Caribbean before participating in Ford Week in Cork, Cowes Week and the Sardinia Cup. The Volvo is "the pinnacle" of his career so far, he says. "It is what I always wanted to do". Maguire, by contrast, has much international experience under his harness, and isn't sure if he needs to do this again, in spite of the adrenalin rush. He lives with his wife in Sydney and has two daughters, Emma (four) and Shona (one-and-a-half).

"I thought about them a lot in the Southern Ocean. For young turks like Justin, it is all part of growing up and having spots, while my priorities are a bit different now."

The Volvo Ocean Race website is www.VolvoOceanRace.org