Steering clear in troubled waters

Sailing/ Round the World Race: Johnny Wattersontalks to Justin Slattery who has experienced the ultimate racing adventure.

Justin Slattery has stories in his head. Pull up and let him tell you about his jaunt with millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, how they broke the world speed record for sailing around the globe. A 125-foot maxi-catamaran it was. Two tennis courts strapped together. Hear what it's like to be awake for 24 hours, 48 hours, what it's like up on the bow when a Volvo Open 70, the fastest mono-hulled boat in existence, is sailing faster than the wind that's driving it. Yes, magic.

Ask the Wexford man what it's like to hear the silence when he's down below, crawling on his hands and knees among wet sails, the silence of the hang time that comes just before 70 feet of boat crashes off the top of a wave in the Southern Ocean. Follow his logic that it is all managed risk when a two-metre wall of water rushes from the bow to the stern as the boat surfs down a mountainous sea and buries itself in the back of the next wave. Ask him about the time under water before the boat's buoyancy kicks in.

Get him talking about physical boundaries and stress levels, or, conviction and survival over 32,000 nautical miles. Get him to speak about life and death on the Atlantic Ocean on a boat that is over-powered, over-canvassed and under-crewed. Talk to him about winning the Volvo Ocean race, about life at the extreme.

"You have this 70-foot platform (boat) surfing down that face of a wave," he says with a shrug.

"When it gets to the bottom of a wave it basically has to turn up a hill. Before the buoyancy clicks over, it's going to pierce the next wave and you'll have maybe two or three metres of solid water come over the deck. Nobody is going to hang on, so we rely a lot on our safety equipment.

"Not only do you have to be clipped on but clipped on in the right places. We wear more safety equipment now, more than I ever had before because of how extreme these boats are and the amount of water we're getting over the deck.

"You're not just clipped on to lines but hard metal points on the boat. Also, you're not positioning yourself in front of equipment like the steering pedestal, because if the wave hits you, then you'll go through solid carbon fibre. When you look at it you wonder how people could be comfortable in an environment like that, driving a boat."

Once a rugby player, now a sailor, Slattery has the arms of a prop on the body of a scrumhalf. He's on top of his game now. Being the bowman of the 10-man crew on ABN-Amro One that won the Volvo Ocean Race 2005-06 has given him global currency in the sport.

Of all the ocean races, the Round the World is the beast they want to do. To do it demands all of the skills, from the brute muscle of the endless grinding of the winches to the technology that designed the boat as a feral animal with nasty, competitive instincts.

It's a boat so highly designed that the interior fibreglass walls remain their ugly natural colour because of the weight considerations of a layer of paint. The boat's beauty is purely genetic, naturally effortless, a by-product of its designer's wishes to go fast and not break.

"In the Southern Ocean there's the possibility of hitting whales or, further down, the ice," says Slattery. "It's incredible sailing that you can get nowhere else in the world. It's days on end of surfing down the biggest waves you will ever see. Three-, four-story buildings rising up behind you and you are only a 70-foot machine striping down the face of them.

"I was never satisfied until I'd done the ultimate racing thing and got down there. When I did it I realised that, yes, this was it and more than I expected it could be, even though it's freezing cold, in minus figures at times, and you're soaking in wet sleeping bags with maybe two hours' sleep. All that you can deal with, because the sailing is so phenomenal."

At 32, Slattery is the same age as Hans Horrevoets was. Horrevoets was trimming the spinnaker on ABN-Amro Two, the sister ship of ABN-Amro One, on day eight of the seventh leg from New York to Portsmouth, England. Those on deck were in the process of rotating positions so each could go below and put on safety harnesses as the weather picked up. Horrevoets was the last one to complete the routine when the boat slammed into a wave at 25 knots, nose-diving and rolling to the side. A great wall of water engulfed everyone on deck as the boat almost submerged. By the time it had burst through the wave and emerged out the other side, the Dutch sailor was no longer on board.

"Every ocean racer's worst fear is falling off a boat, more so than a boat sinking," says Slattery. "Even if a boat sinks you're all going to be together. You'll all be in a raft. But if you fall over you're on your own. The boats are doing 20 knots, 30 knots and within a matter of minutes, it's going to be a few miles away before the guys can physically slow it down and get up to 800 square metres of sail down, trim around and start coming back to search for you.

"If you're out in an ocean in pitch black, when all the worst things seem to happen, and all of a sudden you see your boat disappearing over the tops of waves, it's got to be the scariest feeling you could ever imagine. It has never happened to me, but unfortunately it did on our sister ship, ABN-Amro Two, when Hans was washed over board at two o'clock one morning.

"We were 100 miles away but were aware of it. A very helpless situation, it would have taken us 10 hours to get back there. As it was they did an incredible job and managed to stop the boat, turn it around, find Hans and get him back on board within 40 minutes. That might sound like a lot of time, but to do that in pitch black . . . and to find that little speck in the water . . . it's an incredible feat. Unfortunately they couldn't resuscitate Hans. He died that night.

"It's the world's worst fear, it's something you always have in the back of your mind. It affected the entire fleet. It hit very close to home for everyone out there. I guess you try and push that side of it away and try not to concentrate on the worst consequences."

Slattery would be lying if he said he never felt fear. It's as much of the attraction as the race itself. It is built in to the entire exercise. Pushing the boat to its limits and sometimes beating it up requires controlling the fear and nursing it along.

Even the physical toll that they know the nine legs will take requires a wilful disregard for their bodies. Consuming 6,000 calories a day, they will still lose as much as eight kilos over a 25-day race.

And Slattery's "Popeye" arms are not just from lifting sails and winching, but also from the necessary pre-race gym work. As much as the crew are anoraks, swots and nerds about every facet of the sport from backstays to halyards and are operating at the cutting edge of technology, they are constantly reminded of how puny and irrelevant their existence is on the ocean. They fling themselves at it, and they go into the largest uninterrupted body of water on earth knowing they are going into a 12-round title fight. But their bible is caution and deep respect.

"I have had a few nervous moments. I'd be a liar if I said I hadn't," concedes Slattery. "It was the first night out in the race on the leg from Vigo in Spain to Cape Town. It was just basically pushing the pedal to the metal. There was 40 knots of wind that night, a hell of a lot of wind, and we were doing boat speeds in excess of 30 knots most of the night.

"We broke the steering arm and had a violent knock down at 30 knots. One of the guys clipped on to the leeward side of the boat (the low side as the boat keels over) got washed back and went straight through the steering wheel and pedestal. We ended up ripping the sail in shreds all in the first 13 hours."

In the book produced about the Volvo race of 2005-06, there is a photograph on the opening pages. Taken from a fixed camera on the boat, it shows three bodies, one of them clinging to a winch, all of them entirely submerged along with the boat. There is no skyline, just metres of clear grey water above their heads, bubbles fizzing up as though they had been placed in a large swimming pool. They are suspended there in another world, waiting, trusting. It's the world which ocean sailors inhabit, a surreal world at the outer edges of that continuum that runs from normal to abnormal.

"Now the boats are Grand Prix-style carbon fibre and titanium, specifically built to do this race," says Slattery.

A race. Sometimes you can forget that's just what it is. But never can you believe that is all it's about.

• Life at the Extreme - The Volvo Ocean Race Round the World 2005-2006 , by Rob Mundle, Nomad Press, $44.95.