Pirate captain

Shiver mi timbers...we speak to Paul Cayard about his return to the Volvo Ocean Race

The best piece of news in the build-up to November's Volvo Ocean Race was the announcement by Disney that the race is to be used as a promotional vehicle for the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, Dead Man's Chest. It is a fairly safe prediction this single step will serve to turn what might otherwise have been 'just another round the world yacht race' into an event that leaps out of the sports pages and into general news and tabloids. However with the recent announcement of Paul Cayard as skipper of the Pirates boat, the Disney entry now has real winning potential.

No stranger to these pages, Cayard is one of the great names in our sport. A Star World Champion in 1988, he has sailed in five America's Cups starting out as a trimmer on board the late Tom Blackaller's Defender, that lost to Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes in the defender series for the historic Cup in 1983. He was subsequently tactician for Blackaller on board USA in 1987, then steered Raul Gardini's Il Moro de Venezia to a Louis Vuitton Cup victory in the first event for the new International America's Cup Class yachts 1992. Three years later he sailed the America's Cup again this time at the helm of Dennis Conner's defender Stars & Stripes losing to Team New Zealand and for 2000 had mounted his own AmericaOne campaign, losing in a hard fought Louis Vuitton Cup final to Prada.

However the event that gained Cayard the most profile was the Whitbread Round the World Race in 1997/8 when his EF Language scored an emphatic victory.

At the time, with the exception of many of New Zealand's top sailors, there was much more of a clear divide between the ocean racing fraternity and those who raced inshore. "Part of our success was just a different approach to the event and sailing the boat with an intensity and a focus that we’d learned in America’s Cup and Olympic sailing and applying that to ocean sailing," explains Cayard of how he looks back at his win in the 1997/8 race.

Since then Cayard's approach has become the norm in the Volvo Ocean Race with teams showing greater willingness to cross-fertilise between the fully crewed round the world race, the America's Cup and the Olympics.

Aside from winning on the water in 1997/8, Cayard was by far the best communicator during that race; his honest missives from the high seas about life on board EF Education made for essential reading.

In our recent interview with him about the TP52 class, Cayard said that he was reluctant to get involved with the America's Cup this time because it would require him effectively to spend three years in Valencia at a time when his children are at crucial school/college age and his paternal presence is required at home in San Francisco. However the Volvo Ocean Race, he says, represents a different proposition. It is shorter - from Cayard getting the call-up on 3 May to the end of the race in 2006 is a little over a year in duration.

"I like the race and under the right circumstances, I’m very excited to do it," says Cayard. "I think the sailing is exceptional and it is unique. It is not something you’re going to find doing the Transpac or something like that. I had a great experience the first time and I have a great team this time and I think it will be a lot of fun."

Two factors that helped entice him back was Disney's involvement and the speedy new Volvo Open 70. "The whole thing about representing the film - I find that a unique opportunity and being associated with a film is different from a corporate brand. Then there's the whole thing with the Pirates and what that means to people who have seen the film and kids - it certainly added to my interest."

The Volvo Ocean 70s are obviously much faster than EF Language or Grant Dalton's Amer Sports One on which he sailed part of the last Volvo Ocean Race. They represent a technological leap forward too. "It is a very high tech boat in the world of sailing today. The canting keel and the boards - that is probably the way that other big events in sailing are going to go, so that is another plus for being on the inside and getting that experience and knowledge for the future." This is presumably a thinly veiled reference to the mystery international fleet racing series he is in the process of masterminding with Russell Coutts.

Cayard admits his experience with canting keel yachts is fairly limited. He has sailed Roy Disney's maxZ86 Pyewacket and more recently went for a spin aboard Mike Golding's Open 60 Ecover.

"It is like the boat heels over so you tell your Star crew to hike out," says Cayard. "It is controlled stability whereas with fixed keel boats, they start leaning over more and more and you are just constantly in the process of depowering whether it is letting the traveller down or flattening the main with the backstay. It is a situation where you can set a certain amount of power on the boat and up to a point you can simply add ballast or cant and offset that as you might hike in a Laser or a Star."

At present Cayard is remaining tight lipped about who will be in his 10 man crew. Ex-GBR Challenge Jules Salter is being touted as the team's navigator - Britain seems to be supplying most of the navigators for this Volvo Ocean Race in Ericsson's Steve Hayles, the ABN AMRO under 30 team's Simon Fisher and semi-Brit Andrew Cape on movistar.

Cayard says his sailing crew comes from seven different countries and five ex-EF men are involved with the project. One is Kimo Worthington, a watch captain on EF, who is now 'operational manager' and has been overseeing the build of the new Pirates VO70 at Green Marine in Southampton. Justin Clougher is believed to be back on the bow. Magnus Olsson and Klabbe Nylof are likely to sail with Ericsson if they can prise themselves away from trimaran racing in the Baltic, while Mark Christensen is already signed with ABN AMRO. Meanwhile the others are all with America's Cup teams - Steve Erickson with Luna Rossa, and Lorenzo Mazza, Josh Belsky and Curtis Blewitt all with Alinghi. Freddie Loof, a fellow Star sailor and who also sailed with Cayard on board Amer Sports One, has also been mooted as a potential crew. Anyway, a crew of big guns can be expected and according to Cayard all will be revealed by the end of this month.

Compared to the VO60, this time round teams are sailing a bigger, more powerful boat with less crew. However Cayard says it has not made that much difference to his selection process: "Obviously everybody is going to have to be a good sailor and be involved with the sailing of the boat and the whole thing about being shorthanded, that is something we’re looking into. I went sailing on Mike Golding’s Open 60 to try and get a little insight about that and we have some other sailors who have done some singlehanded sailing involved in the program. So some of those techniques are going to have to be employed at certain times in order to safely handle the boat."

Another subject which Cayard won't say much about is over the running of the campaign. When the Pirates of the Caribbean entry was announced back in March it was being run by Richard Brisius and Johan Salen's Atlant sports management company up in Sweden who are also behind Neal McDonald's Ericsson campaign and for whom Cayard sailed on board EF Language two races ago. However the Pirates campaign is now being run by Cayard's own company. "Atlant is not involved with our project," Cayard says.

However The Black Pearl, or whatever the Pirates boat ends up being called, is a sistership of Ericsson, cracked from the same mould as the Swedish boat and Cayard confirms that the hull and appendage configuration is the same. However the rig is likely to be different - while the ultra-weight conscious Ericsson has a four spreader rig it is expected the Pirate's Hallspars rig will be like movistar and the Brazilians in having four spreaders plus jumpers to support to the topmast.



The Pirates boat is to be launched around 25 August and after sea trials in the UK, team and boat will head for Bayona, close to Vigo on the west coast of Spain, just north of the Portugese border to continue their training and development.

This will make the Pirates boat last of the VO70s to be launched. "I don’t see it as a scramble to get to the start line, but I think our time to go sailing and training is obviously rather limited and we have to be pretty smart about how we plan our time so that we do the most investigating," says Cayard. "This is a brand new class and everybody is trying to figure out what to do with how to sail it and the sails and all that. So we obviously have a lot less time than Telefonica. We just have to be clever about trying to use the time."

Cayard says the graphics on the boat will be different from those originally published when the announcement about the Pirates of the Caribbean entry was first made, although it is hard to imagine them straying too far away from the skull and crossbones theme. Compared to the neat corporate logos on the competition, this should prove to be an eye-catcher at starts, finishes and during in-port racing.

At this stage Cayard is also unable to confirm when he will be kidnapping Kiera Knightley or swashbuckling alongside Johnny Depp. If this happens it is likely not to be until towards the end of the Volvo Ocean Race. Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest is not due for release in the US until 7 July 2006 after the Volvo Ocean Race is over and it is unprecidented that Disney or their worldwide distributors Buena Vista International would want to begin their publicity campaign for the film until a few months before that.

However Cayard agrees that the involvement with the Disney in the Volvo Ocean Race is magnificent for the race and sailing in general. "The short term is that being involved with Disney and the Pirates of the Caribbean and representing an image and a dream rather than just a brand is of interest and I think it will be interesting to the public. It is a well known film, so the boat will be immediately recognised. There is all those pluses short term. Long term there is the opportunity that if a company like Disney has a successful experience with this, it would be a good example for other entertainment companies, if not other companies in general and maybe it would lead to sailing being a useful vehicle for those types of companies."

Keep you eyes peeled on the Solent later this month for a familiar-looking man with moustache at the wheel of a large race boat adorned with the skull and crossbones.