Landing the top job

We speak to ABN AMRO's new skipper Mike Sanderson about his campaign, the race and his new Volvo Ocean 70

Mike Sanderson is a man best described as being 'on a roll'. Since he was 20, the Kiwi sailmaker has been alternating Whitbread/Volvo Ocean Races with America's Cups including winning the former event with Grant Dalton on New Zealand Endeavour in 1993-4 before sailing with Dalton again four years later on Merit Cup.

More recent history has seen Sanderson on the mainsheet of Oracle BMW Racing during the last America's Cup, being part of the design team and principle helmsman on Robert Miller's extraordinary 21st century maxi-schooner Mari Cha IV and as if this were not enough he has shoehorned in racing singlehanded across the Atlantic in this year's The Transat finishing third in the Open 60 class on board Pindar.

The cream on the cake came in Boston at the end of The Transat when Roy Heiner and ABN AMRO shore manager Ben Wright came wandering down the dock to find him. A meeting later in Holland andSanderson was signed up as skipper of what at present appears to be the most promising entry in the 2005-6 Volvo Ocean Race.

In fact this job offer comes as consolation for a deal that went bad for the previous Volvo Ocean Race. Sanderson recounts: "I was in line to skipper the Merit Cup boat in the last race for Grant [Dalton], and then unfortunately we had to give the money back because we didn’t get to the final goalpost because the tobacco laws in the US changed. So that was a tough time for me: going through the emotional high of being offered a Volvo boat in the last race and then for it not to happen due to a technicality. That was pretty disappointing."

The original plan for next year's Volvo Ocean Race was to skipper a boat with Emma Richards. "Emma and I always saw the best way to win the Volvo race was to have two people leading the campaign," says Sanderson. "So that leaves me heavily involved in just working on creating a fast boat and we didn’t pretend that Emma wasn’t going to do a lot more on the PR side of it and the running of the campaign. Our plan was for her to navigate - whether or not that would have worked depending upon workload only time would have told."

When the ABN AMRO offer materialised Sanderson discussed this with Richards and sponsor Andrew Pindar, before leaping at the opportunity. "At the end of the day we were trying to get a team and sponsor together to do the Volvo Race. So if you are offered one which is up and running and looks fantastic on paper, and has already been going for six months with a good sponsor I don’t know why you would give that option away. It would have been tough to have turned that option down and to find ourselves without a sponsor now. That is something Emma and I discussed a lot."

At present Killian Bushe and his build team have the construction of the new boat well underway in Lelystad in Holland. With a launch date of late November/early December, the boat has already been popped from it's mould and is having bits fitted to the inside. She will be the first of the new generation Volvo Ocean 70s to hit the water and because of this progress with the boat has taken a little longer than planned as the team have had to iron out measurement and build issues with her. "The guys are doing an awesome job building the boat," says Sanderson. "It being the first one we are having to spend a lot of time working with the Volvo Race Office and with James Dadd, the Chief Measurer, to make sure we’re all on the same page."

Having the first of a new breed of boat is a double edged sword. While it will gain the team valuable data, competing campaigns will also learn some of this. Fortunately, very much like Ross Field's Yamaha campaign that won the 1993/4 Whitbread Round the World Race when the Volvo Ocean 60 was first introduced, ABN AMRO is a two boat campaign with the potential to have both the first and the last VO70s built for this next race.

"Everyone would agree that the sooner we can get a boat in the water under the new rule, then we are going to make some massive gains. On the other side it would be good to have that time developing a boat," says Sanderson.

Obviously we will have to wait until December to much more about the design intricacy of the new boat. One aspect of the campaign that has surprised race pundits is that the designer of the two boats for the Dutch bank is Juan Kouyoumdjian a man renowned for his radical creations such as the wingmasted Admiral's Cupper Krazy K-Yote II and Frank Pong's new Maiden Hong Kong. The inference is that the new ABN AMRO boats will be outlandish, extreme boats pushed to the limit of the new rule.

"I think Juan has been known for radical things because he’d being trying to make a mark for himself which we all try and do when we’re young and up and coming," says Sanderson. "In fact he’s the same age as me - we turned 33 at a similar time of the year - so I relate really well to him. He feels the responsibility of showing the world the first Volvo 70 and I think everyone is going to be very impressed with the first Juan K Volvo 70."

In fact while Kouyoumdjian has gained high profile from his radical machines, he was also part of Prada's design team for the last America's Cup and is now a fully paid-up member of BMW Oracle Racing. It is therefore probable that the boat won't have a fixed wingmast and wings full of water ballast.

Sanderson says the design process has been very similar to previous Volvo - where the design is based upon a call upon the expected weather conditions and the expected proportions of light, medium and heavy airs upwind, reaching and running. "However this time we have got the whole inshore aspect of the race which is 20% of the points. It is a five leg race - it is one leg which is a lot. You can’t ignore that."

How this might affect the design is uncertainly not helped by the fact that Volvo have yet to specific the exact format of the in-port racing, how many races, whether or not they will be windward-leeward, etc. If they are windward-leeward then in theory the new VO70s should be given more upwind VMG ability, says Sanderson.

In fact the Volvo Ocean Race organisers have yet to announce where in the Baltic their race will go after it has visited Gothenberg. Despite these few issues, Sanderson says he is feeling more confident about the prospects for the Volvo Ocean Race - three more entries are expected to be announced within the next month for example.

In terms of design development the ABN AMRO boats have been through both a tank test program and CFD testing, although the details of exactly what has been tested have yet to be revealed.

While outlandish developments are prohibited for the most part for the Volvo Ocean 70, the two principle areas of investigation are beam and what the appendage configuration will be.

"In fact there are not too many options," confides Sanderson. "The rule limits you to how many axises you can move your appendages. There are one or two rudders which determines itself according to how wide the boat ends up. The downside with two rudders is that unlike the Open 60s we are only able to turn them in one axis. So we’re not allowed to lift them and that makes it pretty tough to go down that road. It's the same with the daggerboard situation - because we’re not allowed to have a single centreboard with a trim tab, you’re left with CBTF technology or twin asymmetric daggerboards. So let’s wait and see."

So expect a single rudder boat with canting keel and twin asymmetric daggerboards. Like many people Sanderson feels having a CBTF configuration in the Southern Ocean to be too risky. "It would be a very tough call to not have a keel in front of your rudder to look after your rudder, would be as much as I could say. Even if it was faster no one really knows what that would be like doing 30 knots in the Southern Ocean."

From a sailing point of view there is a prospect of using furling headsails, but these are unlikely to be seen on the ABN AMRO boat. Even on the Pindar Open 60 permanently fixed furling upwind headsails were removed as they represented too much weight aloft in Sanderson's opinion. What he is unhappy about is the race organisation's attempt to ban Code Zeros.

"They have tried to get rid of Code Zeros, but in fact they haven’t got rid of Code Zeros, all they have done is tried to make them impossible to have in the inventory. What it’s meant is that your Code 5, the sail we use 90% of the time on the Open 60s which would roll up, we still need those type of sails due to the speed of the boat. So they have done a dumb thing by not letting us roll them up in the hope of stopping people using Code Zeros. The fact is that of our four downwind sails, even without a Code Zero, I would have had two of them rolled up probably. So now we have to spend a huge amount of money and time and resources trying to work out how to get these things up and down. If they are trying to make the boats easier and more comfortable and trying to promote mixed crews and female crews, that is one rule they should look at changing back. Roller furlers are a dream - that’s how you get them up and down when you are on your own."

The new boat will be impressively quick - around 15-20% faster than an Open 60 Sanderson believes. "I am constantly blown away by the VPPs. There have been a few boats that have a bit of a sweet spot, in terms of length versus weight and sail area. I think they have done a pretty nice job with the 70 - it might be a bit of a freak size, disproportionately fast if you like."

At present while the boat is under construction, Sanderson is on a recruiting drive. "I was led to believe that the new class was supposed to be easier and better on the people and was going to be more of a pleasure to sail, but that’s not the way I see the rule," he says. "We’re going to need big strong guys. It’s going to make it very tough for anyone who’s not big."

At present Brad Jackson is the only certain crewman on board, although it is expected that Dave Endean, who has been working with Sanderson on Pindar will be involved too. "It is going to be a nice international mix, a lot of whom you will have seen around Mari Cha IV or around the 60 campaign," warns Sanderson. "I am probably about halfway there. Obviously the key thing at the moment is to get the other watch captain and the navigator locked in. I couldn’t convince Lowlife [the legendary Mike Quilter] to come out of retirement for it. He’s living in Keri Keri and is very happy. Mike will be involved but not as the primary navigator going around the world on every leg. We might see him on a couple of legs possibly. I am definitely keen to have him involved, working with our navigator to make sure we set off with a good plan and really to give our navigator someone to talk to."

Once the new ABN AMRO boat is launched Sanderson will begin his training and development program, prior to the construction of the new boat. He will then presumably move on to the new boat leaving ABN AMRO I for the team's second crew. This is likely to be a 'theme' team of sorts, although this remains to be finalised.

"A betting person would put their money on some sort of up and coming crew," says Sanderson. "Whether it ends up mixed or youth I don’t know. We are all getting old. With the lesser [crew] numbers in the race it has got harder again. I got on NZE when I was 20 and I was 21 when the race started. It is going to be very tough this time for someone to do that." This is due to the smaller crews and fewer boats, the fact that all the boats in the race are likely to be big budget affairs and able to buy the best people in the business. "It is going to be tough for the young guys," continues Sanderson. "If that is the route we go down for the second boat, it would be a great thing, because it would give a whole new group of people the opportunity."

While ABN AMRO will be taking up most of his time over the next two years, Sanderson still expects to maintain his position on board the incredble Mari Cha IV and will be racing on board during next year's Rolex Transatlantic Challenge as well as sailing the fully crewed races on board Pindar - lucky bugger.