Austria's solo sailor

Meg Davis-Berry speaks to Norbert Sedlacek about his Vendee Globe campaign

Solo sailors may be well adapted to coping with long days in their own company but almost to a man (and woman) they know how to party on shore.

Austrian Norbert Sedlacek skipper of the Open 60 Austria One was prepared for two weeks alone in the Atlantic prior to the start of The Transat, but the social side of the pre-start hit him hard. “Every day is a party. It’s not as easy as it looks. It’s very tough to party. Everybody wants to talk to you,” Norbert admitted.

This former martial arts champion, who was attracted to sailing to find his ‘inner balance’, is happier starting the day at 6am with a workout on the deck. “To motivate yourself every day is absolutely fantastic.”

So far the self motivation has worked. He has already completed two solo circumnavigations and sailed 85,000 miles single-handed, but The Transat is his first competitive race, and his qualifier for the Vendée Globe.

Sedlacek's career has not always been one of high adventure. The 42-year-old’s first career was as a civil servant in Vienna’s public transport system. The frustrations of the job soon pushed him into sport and in the unlikely direction of the Austrian national Tae Kwon Do martial squad.

After ten years as an amateur champion he realised he could go no further in the sport. “You also reach an age when you start to think about what might happen to you,” Norbert explains. “Tae Kwon Do fighting can be dangerous. You start to worry about breaking bones.”

So no worries then about sailing alone in some of the most dangerous waters in the world? “You learn to live with that. Driving is ten times more risky than sailing across the Atlantic.”

It was visiting old people in retirement homes around Vienna that finally decided him to give up the day job and swap trams for yachts. “I used to give exhibitions to these old people and I would find that some had done things in their lives that they really wanted to do. Even if they were sick and broken now, they were happy. Those who led normal lives, realised nothing had happened. I didn’t want to be in the group which was unhappy with their lives.”

He quit his civil service job in 1996 and built himself an 8m yacht Oasis 2 in which he sailed around the world over the course of two years. His longest solo passage was 6,700 miles from Fiji to Mali.

His next project was to build a 54ft yacht called Icelimit at Chantier Garcia in France. This he sailed solo from Cape Town around Antarctica and back to Cape Town, completing the non-stop voyage in 93days. He reached as far into the Southern Ocean as 62degS and surfed at 25.6 knots.

His loop of the Southern Ocean coincided with the last Vendée Globe fleet being in the same waters at the same time but Norbert was sailing without the back up of the race. When he returned to Cape Town he hatched his plan to compete in the 2004 Vendee Globe.

Last year he acquired Zen an aluminium Bernard Nivelt-designed Open 60 which failed to make the start of the 1996 Vendée and has never raced since. “It was a broken boat,” he says.

He carried out major modifications including moving the cockpit back in order to raise the keel box to deck leave. However he’s well aware that his boat, although not the oldest in the Open 60 mono fleet, is not a winner on speed. “It’s one generation back,” he says. "The aluminium hull is softer than carbon at this weight (10t) and the hand-winched canting keel with a single dagger board in front seems a bit of a monster."

He’ll be happy to get her to Boston within 15 days. “The plan is just to go steady.”
That will be his philosophy for the Vendée too. “I can’t win on speed. I’ll sail at 95%, not 110%, and wait for the others to make a mistake. As a non-stop race it does even things out. You can only take what you can carry so it’s the same for al of us. It’s fairer for the small teams who don’t have so much equipment.”