Dalts Deconstructed

With Club Med's gigantic wing mast towering above him, Grant Dalton stands amidships on the starboard hull and painstakingly arranges the towel that serves as a welcome mat.

Not content with his first attempt, he picks up the towel and lays it back down, so that it’s perfectly squared and aligned with the boarding platform. Then, he looks up and, with a friendly smile, invites a waiting group of journalists to come aboard.

The little ceremony is revealing. It shows both how little and how much he has changed. Attention to detail is a Dalton trademark. At home and in his work, he is fanatically neat and organized - a perfectionist. It’s so central to his character that you can bet when he is finally shuffled off this mortal coil, heaven is in for a major tidy-up.

What has changed, though, is the tolerance and confidence he shows his visitors, most of who are strangers to sailing. He patiently listens and explains. No question is too trivial and, although this has been going on for a week, he pays close attention to each of them.

This is a far cry from the fiercely aggressive, abrasive Dalton of old. Where he was once withering in his scorn for most journalists, he has shed his reflexive distrust and the defensive shield that went with it.

A similar mellowing has taken place with his leadership style. That obsessive attention to detail once translated to a hands-on approach to every facet of a campaign. Now, he demands to know everything that’s going on, but no longer insists on doing it all himself. His authority has lost its white-knuckle intensity and he is happy to delegate.

"The biggest change in me is that I no longer do something most young skippers suffer from," he says, "and that is thinking you have to do absolutely everything yourself." He acknowledges he has progressed from a time when he was ever on his guard against a fear "some bastard was going to take my job."

Without wanting to parrot New Age corporate-speak, Dalton says: "Leadership is about hiring good people and empowering them to get on with it. My job is to set the culture and the goals and then employ the best people to achieve them."

Later, I overhear him telling a French journalist: "I don't have to be a multi-hull specialist. I have French yachtsmen who are. My job is to manage the specialists."

This mellower version of Dalton should not be mistaken for a relaxation in standards. His insistence on quality is as vigorous as ever. Just ask the folk at the Multiplast Yard in France, where Club Med was built and where some friction developed on engineering issues.

Taking command of a 110-foot round-the-world catamaran after his only previous multi-hull experience was a beach cat represents a big leap for Dalton. But, as he points out, even if the scale and the speeds are new the fundamentals remain unchanged. This is a race around the world and he has done plenty of those.

In the late spring of 1977, Heath's Condor led the Whitbread fleet to a tumultuous reception in Auckland, New Zealand. As the yacht rounded the green flanks of North Head at the entrance to the Waitemata Harbour, a youthful Dalton stood watching from his grandparents' house.

The sight of the handsome wooden sloop, with its then radical carbon-fibre mast, stirred the young accountant and changed his life forever. "I just couldn't take my eyes off it," he recalls. "This huge (by the standards of the day) yacht had sailed all that way. The adventure and magnitude of it all struck me."

For days afterwards, as the Whitbread fleet enjoyed its New Zealand stopover, Dalton stood at the dock, watching and absorbing it all. He made no approaches to the sailors or skippers, just observed everything they did and dreamed of being part of this event.

Then, with a methodical determination that has marked all his subsequent endeavours he set about making the dream come true. He quit his job and, like countless other would-be sailors, joined a sailmaking firm.

He was no stranger to sailing, having grown up with the typical New Zealand P-class yachts. Less typically, he graduated to 18 Foot Skiffs, which, along with a passion for motorbikes, more suited his crash and burn temperament and love of speed.

Now, though, he needed offshore experience, so he raced in as many coastal and offshore events as he could find. And he studied. "There was a book called, Cape Horn to Port. I left it beside my bed and read it over and over for years. Up to a few years ago, I could probably recite it."

By now, the 1981-82 Whitbread was coming around and Dalton was primed and ready. He applied to everybody, including compatriot Peter Blake, who was preparing his Ceramco New Zealand campaign. Dalton was turned down.

Time was getting short and he still had no ride when, out of the blue, a Dutch couple living in Auckland asked him to come to dinner.

The Stoeps, as they were called, were friends of Cornelis van Rietschoten, the Dutch ace, who won the 1977 race with Flyer. Van Rietschoten, preparing to defend his title, had received Dalton's application and asked the Stoeps to look him over.

The dinner took place on a Wednesday night. Thursday morning, Dalton got the call from Holland. He was a member of the Flyer crew. On the weekend, he was airborne and on his way.

Dalton's ambition went beyond just experiencing a Whitbread. He wanted to lead a Whitbread campaign and he had it all mapped out. After victory in Flyer, he had to be a watch captain for the 1985-86 race. By 1989, he wanted his own project. "If I couldn't be a watch captain in '85, I would have stopped altogether," he says. "If I was going to be anything, I knew I had to keep moving."

Blake obliged by appointing him as a watch captain on Lion New Zealand. The next major milestone came when Dalton met Gary Paykel, head of the New Zealand whiteware manufacturer, Fisher & Paykel. For the 1989-90 race, Dalton's career path was following its preconceived track with a deadly accuracy: he was at the helm of his own Whitbread maxi named Fisher & Paykel NZ.

Fisher & Paykel was a near-perfect campaign. Sadly for Dalton and his crew, they came up against a perfect one. Blake in Steinlager II swept around the world to win every leg of the race. Fisher & Paykel was second.

Now a new book occupied Dalton's bedside table. It was his own notes on what was wrong with Fisher & Paykel. He was merciless in his self-criticism, describing the book as "how not to win the Whitbread Race". Typically, however, he learned and absorbed and for the next Whitbread, with the New Zealand Endeavour maxi, he at last sailed to glory, winning the event convincingly.

For the last Whitbread, Dalton was forced to go offshore for his funding - a development he describes as disappointing but inevitable, given the competing sponsorship demands in New Zealand's small economy. Sailing in his first Whitbread 60 campaign, he took the Monaco-based Merit Cup team to second place.

Five Whitbreads and now The Race would be enough circumnavigations for most folk, but Dalton is continuing to push for a Volvo campaign. "I don't want to go on doing this forever," he says, "but I would like another crack at the Volvo Race. If I manage to get a project - and it is about 50-50 at the moment - it will definitely be my last. Having said that, if The Race is a success, I wouldn't mind doing this again."

Standing at the helm of Club Med as it surges across the flat water off the Portuguese coast, Dalton surveys his expansive domain. As his crew work diligently to achieve the levels of reliability and preparation his perfectionism demands, he gives a nod of approval. "I am really enjoying this."

First published on QuokkaSailing.com, republished with permission.