The dude on the bow

We get the musings of Pirates of the Caribbean and Alinghi bowman Curtis Blewett

If heavy metal music were personified in grand prix yacht racing it would come in the form of Canadian Curtis Blewett. Aside from carrying out a heavyweight program of alpine pastimes and mountain biking and one would imagine any number of other extreme sports (human cannonball, stunt motorcyclist, etc) Blewett is also one of the top bowmen in the business. In Valencia he currently works the mid-bow for Alinghi, but over the last few months he and Rodney Ardern have managed to negotiate a temporary leave of absence from the Swiss America's Cup defenders to compete in the Volvo Ocean Race, both with Paul Cayard as part of the swashbuckling Pirates of the Caribbean entry.

In Blewett's case this has been a return to the fold, having raced with Cayard and won the 1997/8 Whitbread aboard EF Language as bowman and rigger . After the race eight years ago Blewett subsequently signed on as part of Cayard AmericaOne AC challenger in 2000. Since 2001 he has been an integral part the bow/rig posse within Bertarelli's elite.

In fact Blewett's participation in the Volvo Ocean Race last week came to an abrupt halt in Wellington when he was forced to stand down from his position as bowman on The Black Pearl following a back injury he sustained on the leg from Melbourne.



"If I had a week or 10 days or even another couple of days it might be enough to give it the thumbs up, but I’ve had a shot in the disc to try and relax it," he told thedailysail on the dock in Wellington. As he put it - he had bulged a disc around the L4-L5 area, a lower back injury that is fairly commonplace in his line of work. "With these boats and how radical the sailing is and the fact that I am a bowman and have such a physical role on the boat, I just don’t have time to rehab it fast enough to play my role that I’ve been responsible for until now.".

So Blewett was forced to wave goodbye to his yacht - although in fact he and Ardern were always due to step off in Rio de Janeiro to return to the regular positions at Alinghi. Still this was the first time in Blewett's career he had had to stand down due to injury. "I’m disappointed," he said. "This next leg is what this race is all about it for me. Your second crack of going down to the Southern Ocean in this race is when you have got it together and you can go down there and really push it. Our boat is finally working really good and we have a really great group of guys, so I think they are going to have a pretty good time and I am hoping for a good result from them."

Compared to his ride around the globe on the Whitbread 60 EF Language eight years ago, The Black Pearl Volvo Open 70 he finds tougher but also a fresh challenge. "On the 60s you’d do more changes," Blewett says."Physically on this boat there are less guys and they are bigger boats so you have bigger sails. And we are still stacking - so throwing that gear around is tough and at the higher speed you have to be a little more careful not to get caught out."

Up on the bow on the 60 there would have been two of them, whereas now there is only one. "But that’s alright, we’re getting older, wiser and have more miles and we've factored in how to do that," Blewett continues. "But the boats are very physical. The amount of water coming over the deck at higher speed means we have to be far more safety conscious about being clipped in, not necessarily to prevent going overboard, but one of my main concerns with these boats has been getting washed back into fittings and being broken around the deck or the shrouds. Just the hydraulic pressure on the deck is a constant factor - that’s probably the biggest difference."

As a result you need to think more about the changes and your position on the boat, when you can go up and down the mast, etc. "I look around the fleet and there are a lot of seasoned guys around, there’s not a lot of young guys on the bow of these boats and that is a good thing for this lap until this class settles down a bit."

In the circumstances and particularly given the speed of the boats and their ability to funnel water down the deck it comes as little surprise that a majority of injuries suffered on board by the crew have been when they have been working forward of the cockpit.

"I went tumbleweeding down the deck a couple of times this last leg," confirms Blewett. "I found a hole in my pants and then I looked and I realised there was a hole in my gaiter, my pants, my boot and into my leg. Whatever I’d smacked into had gone through all of it. So we are getting rinsed around a bit. It was good windy conditions on a lot of this leg, so clip in short, always clip in and just be careful with your positioning and good communication with the driver is what you are about."

And at night? "A better game plan!" he says. "But we can see pretty good at night, we are pretty nocturnal, it is never as dark as you think, never black. You can see. We don’t use night vision. If it got that bad you’d have to get another guy to communicate half way." On the last leg from Melbourne the nights were helped by a full or nearly full moon. It is also at present summer in the southern hemisphere so the nights are relatively short. "On the last leg we had some of the most beautiful nights of sailing I’ve ever had on the race - it was awesome."

One of the principle differencies in his role on board the Black Pearl as opposed to the Alinghi Cup boats or EF is that on their VO70 doesn't carry a pole. "You have less gear flying around and 70kg more on the bulb. It makes my job easier," says Blewett. However even the bowsprit alternative is potentially still fraught with every bit as much danger. "Going out to the end of the bowsprit I always clip in and just be damned careful. There are some fittings out there like the tack of the spinnaker that have to be worked on. So you have to pick your moment as you can get into a lot of trouble. I have been hanging on to the end of that bowsprit with my body straight out surfing in the waves. It’s only happened a couple of times, but it is £$%"%£ scary. When you are caught on the end of the sprit you just have to hang on to it and you body just rags straight out. If the water comes up close enough you just end up surfing, laying above the sprit. It is not cool - there is nothing cool about it. It is awful, it makes you nauseous."



In terms of his role on board he says there in fact it isn't as different to racing a Cup boat as you would imagine. "It is different physically and the race is different, but the role of the bowman and being heads up and looking one move ahead and running sheets for the next problem anticipating what could possibly go wrong is the same. As a bowmen and generally as crew you have a lot more opportunities to lose races than win races. In that way it is very similar and it won’t change - you have to be looking around figuring out what is going to happen next, what is going to break next, what you can do next to make the boat go faster - it is just that level of anticipation that is required to race a very high level is very similar. That is why there are guys and skppers who can race and do good in both events - it is that foresight and that intensive anticipation that is very valuable.

"It's an area of the boat that if it gets unmanaged or you lose track of it, you start having breakdowns and get things tangled up and then you can’t make a sail change or you have to scrub a sail change, then that is just a lost opportunity tactically. If we do our job perfectly then all the options are always open tactically and we can shift gears and turn corners whenever we need to to take advantage of opportunities. If we lag behind or don’t follow through on that then we miss out on those opportunities. Sometimes on legs you look back and there will be one or two real moments where that was the race winning decision and if are not organized to follow through on a sail change or make the move at the moment, if we miss the move by a few hours or we break down or can’t do the sail change then we miss that opportunity then we’ve thrown away the leg. So that is to be avoided."

On deck in the Volvo Blewett has been wearing largely Musto gear including a dry top with rubber seals. However he has been using Marinowool underlayers, made from a high quality wool he's used previously skiing and mountaineering. This has good wicking properties to expel excess moisture outward to prevent "the onset of baboon arse" as he puts it.

While this all sounds nice, Blewett is of the opinion that as a VO70 bowman there is nothing he can do to prevent himself getting wet. "I am always wet and I just have gotten my head round it years ago that when I’m working I am going to be wet, so I don’t try too hard to stay dry. It’s a waste of my time, I have better thing to spend my energy on than staying dry. If you don’t want to get wet, don’t be a bowman on the Volvo."

He says he regrets not having had enough time before the start of this race to work on developing on some new gear for them to wear. "You can whine about all the little details for ever, but these guys have been doing this race for 30 years now or whatever and they were doing it in a lot worse gear than we are."

On board the Black Pearl they have developed some special harnesses to minimise the amount they are thrown around but Blewett says he is not a fan of the crash helmet. "For me it is more important to move around quick and have my peripheral vision and my balance. So I guess I am a little more old school. I race mountain bikes and climb and I am wearing a harness or body armour and helmets and all that stuff 200 days a year. So I am happy to wear them when I think I need them for all those other sports. But I am happy to go sailing without them. It is that versus getting your job done, I don’t know - some day maybe we’ll have some boats where you need full face helmets, but these aren’t the boats."

So surely going from a canting keel twin daggerboarded boat capable of flying through the Southern Ocean at 30+ knots back to a Cup boat in the relative tranquity of Valencia will be something of a come-down for someone who is so obviously an adrenaline-junkie. "For the America’s Cup the volume is on 10 for two hours. Here the volume goes up and down, but it still hits 10 often enough to keep you on your toes. So
it is not going to be as exciting in terms of boat speed but the sublties are rewarding in the Cup - the calibre is go high and its so refined, I enjoy that too. So I am pretty lucky. I’m not going to pick one or the other. I can’t believe how lucky I am I get to do both."