Thank heaven for Grant

Ed Gorman talks to the most charistmatic man in Southampton, Grant Dalton, about to embark on his seventh round the world race

The Volvo Ocean Race village in Southampton is hardly jumping with exciting pre-race scandal or the sort of intensive pre-start speculation that usually accompanies major sporting events. But then luckily we've got Grant "I've got a lot on" Dalton.

The indefatigable Kiwi has not so much joined the race as stormed into town, looking knackered and giving the impression that he and his colleagues in the Nautor syndicate have barely been able to catch their breath before turning up for "assembly week" at the thinly-attended race village.

While the illbruck team took two weeks holiday prior to bringing their immaculate (that was Dalton's adjective for them, not mine) lime green and white steed into the marina, Nautor have been working 18-hour days for four months and most of them look like they need the first leg to get some decent rest.

The big talking point, of course is why Dalton chose to take the Mani Frers boat when he could have taken a perfectly good hull by the man he has always relied on in this race, Bruce Farr. (During Dalton's pre-race press conference at the Royal Southern Yacht Club in Hamble, the former Merit Cup and more recently Club Med skipper revealed he left a message informing Farr about a week ago of his choice but the call has not been returned).

Dalton says the choice made itself. In other words he and the other key members of his team just looked and looked at the numbers during frantic weeks of testing and the qualifying sail and let the answer come to them. But they settled on this approach only after "tearing their hair out over
it" initially as they began comparing the boats at their training base in Spain.

While the Farr boat is a sistership of Assa Abloy and is what Dalton regards as Farr's best answer for the new generation, the Frers thoroughbred is lighter, wider, more stable and more powerful and should go well in heavy conditions and the power-reaching for which this race was once well-known. Frers claims he has squared the circle with this one and the boat will not be sluggish in the light either - we shall see.

"Over the miles of testing we have done, the boat has certainly proved itself," said Dalts in his off the cuff address at the Royal Southern. "It was not a case of one good boat and one slow boat, it was about two good boats. It's about applying the expected weather around the world to the performance of the boats in terms of the polars. I think the girls (skippered by Lisa McDonald) have got a great boat and I know we have too...we'll see how it works out over nine months around the world," he added.

But to some of his rivals looking in from the outside, the decision looks heavily political with one old foe reckoning Dalts was leaned on by Nautor to choose a "Swan" over a Farr. Others observers like this correspondent, believe "corner-banging" psychology might well have come into it, i.e. Dalts knows he is hopelessly late and way behind on sail development and thus concluded he could not win in a Farr whereas he might just get lucky in the Frers boat, if conditions favour his hull form.

I put it to him. "If I was sitting on the outside I'd think that for sure," he said. "If I was looking in I'd say that was a corner-bang - has to be. I think we'll just have to see." Having given more or less the official version in the press conference he then gave a detailed and more revealing account of the decision-making process, speaking almost as if off a checklist of past thoughts. "In the last race I picked too early and I picked wrong," he said. "This time we literally didn't make this decision until two weeks ago - got to leave the decision to pop out - got to leave it as long as you can - got to be fair to the Frers boat. I didn't expect this decision. Even in Spain, if I'd decided then, I'd have taken the Farr boat.

"First we had to find out what the differences were," he added. "It was only after we identified where we thought the Frers was weak and were able to try to take steps to strengthen its weaknesses and then test all the way up from Spain and sail off in the wrong direction downwind testing and stuff, that I felt the decision popped out." Then came the moment of truth. "As we motored down the Solent - I was on the Farr boat up from Spain - I crossed over to the Frers boat and I looked at Bouwe (Bouwe Bekking, co-skipper) and he nodded and I went over to Mani who was on board and I said 'it's yours'," Dalts added.

What about sails? Dalts has relied on his own experience rather like a man trying to find the exit to a room he knows well after the lights have failed. But there has also been some piracy involved and Ross Field's Team News Corp was the victim. "We knew we were far behind on sail development," explained Dalts. "The first thing we did was say 'we've got to get somebody - we've got to steal somebody out of one of these teams.' So we took a guy called Phil Airey out of News Corp, knowing that they were working with North, New Zealand which is probably better than anywhere as a central pool of knowledge for Volvo sailing. So we took him - you're ours - so he brought with him straight away all that knowledge."

Swashbuckling stuff at the expense of another team which has lost quite a few assets during the build-up. Dalts is late, he is sailing a "strange" boat with people he hardly knows. On Club Med he wrote the book on time-on-the-water and pre-race preparation, this time he is scrawling the manual on how to do it at the last minute. At this stage a win looks very unlikely and, as Dalts himself remarked, it's a hell of a long way round when you are coming second.

But the Kiwi legend is not ruling out a dramatic performance (which is what it would have to be) and you'd be foolish to write him off just yet. "It's not perfect, there's no doubt about it. But I think we've caught up better than a lot of people think," he said.