30 year old Volvo veteran

Ed Gorman talks to Matt Humphries about his fourth time round in this event

Matt Humphries just can't say no to the Volvo Ocean Race. At just 30, he has already been round three times ( With Integrity 1989/90, as skipper on Dolphin & Youth 1993/94 and as watch leader on Swedish Match 1997/98) yet he is now back in sailing his fourth race on Gunnar Krantz's SEB (currently leading the Volvo Ocean Race) and with high hopes that he will finally win.

"Absolutely we can win," he told madforsailing in the spotless SEB pavilion at the Volvo Ocean Race village in Ocean Village prior to the start. "This is my fourth time. We were third last time. Everything we have done as a team has been purely based on winning the race. A lot of time and effort has gone into this campaign. We have learnt the lessons of the last race and previous races and we feel we've come to Southampton with an extremely strong project," he said.

SEB could easily win this four-yearly classic, though the boat is not being widely tipped to do so. The campaign is deep in experience, money and time on the water. The crew includes six veterans from Swedish Match plus the top Dutch offshore navigator, Marcel van Triest. The budget is said to be in the region of $19 million - Humphries says the team has been denied nothing it wanted - and the syndicate spent months on intensive sail testing in Portugal and Sweden.

It is fascinating that the Bruce Farr-designed lurid lime green SEB is widely thought to be the narrowest boat in the eight-strong fleet while Swedish Match was reckoned to be the fattest hull last time round. It seems Krantz has gone from one extreme to another, intentionally or otherwise. Humphries, who initially tried hard to get his own Scandanavia-based syndicate together, says most of the key decisions in this area were already taken when he re-joined Krantz in September last year.

"We did have a wide boat but we felt we were slow," he explained. "We felt our sail inventory and the aggressive way we sailed the boat made up for our boatspeed. Swedish Match was a powerful boat but we were slow in light conditions." Humphries has examined the weather conditions in the last race in detail. Light airs, he says, predominated during the first leg, in the section up the Argentine coast to Brazil, through the Tropics on the way to the US and across the Atlantic. He believes light or upwind conditions may well characterise the final short legs in northern Europe at the end of this race.