Prize property

We speak to ex-EF and illbruck crewman Mark Christensen about ABN AMRO and his time with Pegasus Racing

November's Volvo Ocean Race will be the fourth for 35 year old New Zealander Mark 'Crusty' Christensen, who's remarkable career in the crewed round the world race followed up a fourth place on board Dennis Conner's Winston in 1993-4 with wins on both Paul Cayard's EF Language and John Kostecki's illbruck Challenge.

While his fellow illbruck crew Stu Bannatyne and Richard Clarke have signed up with Pedro Campos' Telefonica (most of the rest are with BMW Oracle Racing) Christensen has joined Mike Sanderson's ABN AMRO team where his winning experience makes him a prize assessment. And yet enjoying his time with Philippe Kahn's diverse Pegasus Racing program in the States where he has spent the intervening years since illbruck and now with a young family, Christensen says his competing in this year's Volvo Ocean Race so nearly didn't happen.

"I wasn’t really planning to leave Pegasus," confides Christensen. "I’d been running that for the last couple of years. I’d had a few people come and talk to me and I thought about it and thought ‘no, I’m on to a good thing and I’m really enjoying the sailing that I’m doing’. Then Moose [Mike Sanderson] called up out of the blue and said ‘look I heard you’re not interested, but have you really considered it?’ And I mentioned it to my wife and that it was Portugal [the team are based in Portimao on the Algarve]. She got excited and thought it wasn’t a bad place to spend a year. She’s worried that my eldest daughter who is six won’t be able to travel soon and we thought well maybe it would be good to have one last trip around. The timing was perfect. A week either way I probably wouldn’t have done it."

With the crew now training on their new first generation Volvo Open 70 Christensen says he has been genuinely surprised by the pace of the new boat. "Having sailed the old boat for so long - three years ago that was about as quick as you went. Maxis might have gone quicker upwind but they didn’t go any quicker downwind in a breeze. And I hadn’t hopped on a canting keel boat before. So to go on this for the first time was like ‘wow’. They are quite different - just amazing speed and incredible power.

"I was more surprised when we went to a design meeting and Juan K showed us the polars and we thought ‘that can’t be right’. On the last race the first leg took 30-32 days for the first boat and most times when Juan’s run the router the first leg this time is around 20 days - 50% faster. So it is pretty significant. And then you consider that averages out over all the times. The other boat [illbruck] was doing 9 knots upwind. Maybe this will do 10 or 11, but that is not 50% quicker, so other times you’ll have to be going more than 50% quicker.

"Fortunately I love reaching, and that’s why you do the race because you don’t have to go upwind or downwind as much as you go reaching, and these boats will just chew up the miles. Most of the time it seems we have been doing more than wind speed on most points of sail. So it’s pretty exciting."

A shorter round the world race thanks to the speed of the boat is to Christensen most welcome. "The novelty of being offshore for 30 days has gone a little bit. It has always been the start has been great, the last 1,000 miles has been great and there is a period in the middle that has been slow. Maybe the period in the middle has diminished this time."

To date ABN AMRO has been hitting her polars and this is excellent news for the team and in particular designer Juan Kouyoumdjian as it is qualifies his design tools as being accurate. "I really didn’t think that was going to happen," admits Christensen.

The change over to canting keels as opposed to the water ballast system of the Volvo Ocean 60, Christensen says will make the boat much easier to sail the boat. On illbruck they used to take 30 seconds or so to transfer 90% of the water across, heeling the boat right over, before tacking or gybing and topping up the remainder. On ABN AMRO you hit a button by the helm and the keel automatically swings itself over on to the new tack - job done.

Christensen says that compared to the water ballasted 60, the canting keel 70 has more stability but the stability curve is flatter and thus the new boat is more 'tippy'. "The bigger thing with these boats, and our boat in particular, is the twin daggerboards and knowing how much of those to put down and whether to have any. It's the same with the rudders and learning whether it is better to sail the boat flat and have two rudders in or heel the boat and have one out."

Having sailed with the last two winning Whitbread/Volvo Ocean Race campaigns we are interested to find out from Christensen if there were any common factors to them and if these are being translated to the Dutch bank's campaign.

"One of the things which was good about illbruck and EF was some of the structures that were in place, the organisation things… I think Moose has done well here. It is always hard when you go through this first stage, where everyone is just coming together and there is a lot of work with the boat. The other things was my role with both the last teams was being responsible for trying to find a bit more speed - not just in sail shapes but maybe in sail concepts - and the ways we sail the boat and maybe I can do some of that here too. So, just put some structure in place for the testing and what we are going to test and document it all."

Despite this role and the gathering of his fellow sailmakers Sanderson has put together in the team Christensen admits that he's never been a sailmaker and never worked in a sail loft. "That is probably a good thing. They talk about cloths and I know about that, but that is my limit. I wouldn’t know how to set up a machine that’s for sure. I fell into that trap a little bit with EF when Francesco d’Angelis left. I became the sail co-ordinator for that boat. I wasn’t last time with illbruck, but I was responsible for the testing and just documenting it all."

Wearing his speed doctor hat Christensen says the rig on the VO70 represents a different challenge to the VO60. The sail plan is a lot more powerful and there is not the struggle for horsepower as there was particularly before the VO60s were allowed masthead kites.

So will the race in the new VO70s be as competitive as before? "It would be nice, although we'd like to have an edge..." says Christensen. "You have a design that is a bit more open. The length, sail area and mast height are constrained. The appendages are free. There are maximum and minimum total boat weights like last time. You can have multiple foils and logic tells you that someone will be quick and someone might not be. You’ve got to hope that we have got somewhere close.

"It might be like the first time the Whitbread 60s went round when the boats had fractional spinnakers and you tended to see the boats shoot off in different angles a bit more because they couldn’t go on all points of sail - they just had dead spots on their angles. I think you’ll see that on these boats a bit because what will happen is that the sail inventory is reduced so some people will have sails with sweet angles and they’ll be going down there and other sails will be optimised higher and they’ll be going off there and then you’ll have boats that are optimised differently. And then some boats might be better in light air or heavy air or reaching. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that the boats are one minute a couple of hundred miles ahead and then the next minute getting caught up again as conditions change."

Sailing a bigger boat with bigger albeit fewer sails with a reduced crew will also change the way the boat is sailed. "Last time you might only have six or eight people on deck during a sail change, but that was enough people to do the change. This time when you only have nine people on board to get six or eight on deck, it is kind of a big ask to get them out of their bunks. So I think maybe sail changes will cost a bit more time. You might see a few strange things happening there. If you could look a little closer there will be boats turning down a few miles while they got rid of one sail and put something else up. But we don’t know yet."

Pegasus and Philippe Kahn

Between illbruck and ABN AMRO Christensen has spent most of his time in California running Philippe Kahn's sailing program with Pegasus Racing, a position where one gets the impression he was highly content.

"It’s been fantastic," says Christensen. "We haven’t had a limit on what we could do apart from what class Philippe wanted to sail at the time. Each project that we attacked we would typically get a chance to do some two boat testing, although it wasn’t like the America’s Cup..."

The Kahn fleet of boats stands at about 50 at present although most of them are dinghies and there is much duplication between Kahn's bases in California and Honolulu.

Kahn is one of the most enthusiastic sailor/owners Christensen has encountered. "He himself sails pretty much every day between 300 and 330 days a year. It is his enjoyment. He’ll go to work and will take a couple of hour or maybe even two periods of a couple of hours and go sailing. And then outside of that we would try and fit in some testing, some sail development work. We would make small jumps every so often. Even if we weren’t changing sails we would know what sails were the best combination and what seemed to work on different boats.

"He does love the sport. I think his ideal sailing experience is heading out at about 6 o’clock at night out of Honolulu and sailing during the early evening and through dusk and when it’s dark. He loves sailing when it is dark, when the sun’s down and it’s still warm. That’s why the Transpac appeals to him so much."

Having won the Transpac twice in his Pegasus maxi, since sold, Kahn was looking for a replacement with which to score his third line honours win. "There were a few rumours about Morning Glory," says Christensen of Hasso Plattner's maxZ86. "He did look at buying it but the price wasn’t quite what he was hoping to pay. Then he looked at the new Nicorette but the rig broke and then the Transpac committee said they couldn’t enter the boat as it was - they’d need to make changes. It fits under the rating limits but it’s length overall was a bit long. They were going to let it in because it was built in the Southern hemisphere. Now they’re not."

So would Philippe Kahn do a Volvo Ocean Race campaign? "I think he would be interested but probably age and his lifestyle would prevent that," says Christensen. "He is an incredibly fit guy but he is around 53 and I don’t think many people have done the race into their 50s. He is probably fitter than me and he is certainly a lot stronger. He trains a couple of hours every day. He has the phone next to him. He doesn’t sleep a lot. He very much naps for a couple of hours checks email and then does that again for a couple of hours during the night. He’ll be up from 10am until 2-3 the following morning. It is a different lifestyle but it seems to work. You get a lot done. I had a fantastic time with him and we had a good relationship."

Kahn may still do the Transpac this but with Christensen two handed on his 55ft cruising yacht. Fortunately July is one of the quieter times with the ABN AMRO campaign but as Christensen points out: "These campaigns always need more time not less…"