The first thing Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing’s navigator Simon Fisher did when his team won opening leg of the Volvo Ocean Race was consort with the opposition.
While his team-mates celebrated their victory, Fisher headed to Spanish team MAPFRE, where he was reunited with wife Maria and one-year-old son Alexander, whose first birthday took place during the voyage. “This race is different for me because it’s the first one I’ve done as a father. My wife understands because she works as part of the on-shore crew for another team so its part of our family life,” Fisher told Sport 360.
“We don’t think of it being too strange but I guess for people on the outside, it could be.”
For spectators, almost everything about the Volvo Ocean Race is peculiar. For eight three-week periods over the course of nine months, the crews make their way around the world in tough conditions. They only sleep for three-and-a-half hours at a time, eat freeze-dried food and share tiny spaces but the reward for being the best at that is immense, as Fisher and Azzam team-mates are discovering.
They arrived from Alicante in Spain to Cape Town in South Africa first and used the extra days to enjoy the sights at what Fisher has called one of his favourite stops. “We went to Cape Town to see the penguins, and in Simon’s Town we have done lots of animal oriented, kiddy things for my son,” he said. “And then we got back into preparing. We feel like one of the stronger teams but we know we have to take it one leg at a time.”
After being part of three other races and plenty of disappointment, Fisher hopes this time will be different and believes it can be because of the regulation changes. For the first time in the race’s 41-year history, the boats are standardised as part of an effort to save costs, lower the barriers of entry and level the playing field.
“At the start, you know you’ve got the tool to win,” Fisher said. “Rather than trying to optimise the boat, we’re all just learning to sail one boat as fast as we can. That makes a difference because when someone is going faster than you, you know they are doing something better than you. Nothing else.”
Previously bigger budget teams could afford better boats. Now every team spends €5 million (18.4m AED) to purchase the boat and then pays €1.5m (5.5mAED) to be part of the boatyard – the shared service centre at each port. A dedicated team of on-shore workers attend to all the boats using a shared pool of spare parts. There are two boatyards in operation and they leapfrog each other through the race.
While the one in Cape Town was in operation, the second one was set up in Abu Dhabi and the Cape Town one will move on to Sanya while the Abu Dhabi one will go to Auckland.
During the first leg, no major damage was done to any of the boats but Fisher expects that to change as the race goes on. “This wasn’t a particularly tough leg on the boat. There will be others where things will get more smashed up.”And he would know.
In the last race, Abu Dhabi’s mast broke on the first day, “a fairly catastrophic” occurrence which cost them any chance of winning. This time, there were no concerns in that department thanks to what Fisher believes is a more robust boat which he intends to look after as best as possible, because that will be crucial if they are to win the race.
“It’s been built a little bit stronger. Last time, the builders had to push the limits of structure versus reliability and were always walking the line of it can go faster but you might break,” Fisher said. “It’s quite nice now that we don’t have to push it as hard in that respect. Obviously, if you don’t look after things, they might break but we know how many miles each of the pieces have to go before we replace them.”
So do all the other teams which has created an enhanced form of camaraderie in the already close sailing community. “The pool of sailors who do the race tend to be the same so you know each other very well. With the one-design format, people aren’t trying to guard secrets quite as frantically,” Fisher said. “In that way, it’s been quite a friendly race.”
It needs to be because there are times when the other sailors are all each other has. “When you are racing in the Southern Ocean, you’re as far away from land as you can be. The closest people to you are the other competitors,” Fisher explained. “It makes for an interesting dynamic because the guys you are trying to beat, might end up saving your life.”
That’s exactly what happened on Fisher’s first race in 2006, when he was part of the ABN Amro II team. Two days after a member, Hans Horrevoets, died after he could not be resuscitated after falling overboard, Fisher’s boat had to rescue crew from the HMS Mersey, which was sinking. “It was a pretty traumatic few days,” Fisher remembered. “Some of the best moments of my life have been in this race, but also some of the worst.”
This time, Fisher is hoping for a lot more of the former especially because he is part of a crew of old friends. Skipper Ian Walker picked his mates from people he has sailed with in the past. Three of the current crew, including Justin Slattery and Fisher, were part of Walker’s Green Dragon team in the 2008-9 Volvo Ocean Race and both Slattery and Fisher were also part of the 2011-12 Abu Dhabi team. Being so familiar with each other is what Fisher believes is their biggest advantage.
“Everybody knows each other really well and actually it makes it quite easy because we’re in each other’s pockets all the time. There’s no hiding from anyone. We even share beds because one person gets up and another gets in it,” he said.
“Everyone is very professional but it definitely helps that we’re all friends. With this one-design stuff, the racing is so close and so intense, it's actually quite nice for everyone to have a laugh and keep the level of pressure down. You need a certain atmosphere to make it bearable. If everyone was really intense all the time, it would be a pretty stressful three weeks.”
Not that Abu Dhabi have had much to be anxious about so far. They took the lead early on in the first leg and held onto for most of the way and were similarly dominant during the Cape Town in-port race. Starting downwind, they pulled away from the chasing pack and saw off challenges from Team Brunel and SCA to finish first as well.
The pressure is on them to pull off a repeat in the second leg, which takes them to their home port in Abu Dhabi. There will be still be seven legs after that, so Fisher knows there is a long way to go before he can really start celebrating but he believes this time, he may have reason to. “We are thinking about winning but we have to take it a leg at a time,” he said. “It’s what I’ve been working towards for over a decade so if it happens, it would be incredible.”
