From Walthamstow to the Figaro

We speak to Nigel King about his diverse sailing career and his latest project

While Sam Davies has now graduated up in the world of singlehanded sailing to the exclusive Open 60 class with her sponsor Roxy, thankfully her shoes are being filled in the Figaro class this year by two British sailors.

38 year old Nigel King is a familiar face in the racing community having sailed the Volvo Ocean Race with News Corp in 2001-2, been part of Ellen's Kingfisher 2 Jules Verne crew as well as much sailing on numerous smaller keelboats of all shapes and sizes, including, most recently, Chris Bull's Jazz in the Rolex Sydney Hobart race.

King's background is unusual in our otherwise plummy sport as he comes from Walthamstow in the east end of London, know locally for its dog track, the boy band East 17 and most recently for the large part of it set to be flattened ready to have the 2012 London Olympic venue built on top of it. Generally career opportunities for teenagers in Walthamstow extend to car theiving at best which is what makes King's present place in the yacht racing community all the more remarkable.

"If you told me it was going to be like this when I was 18, I’d have told you you were nuts," he tells us in his full-on Cockney when we sat down to speak in Sydney recently.

At school King was into water sports such as white water kayaking and was first introduced to sailing through friends of his elder brother that resulted in doing a season up on the Blackwater on the east coast. But his first break was when he signed up for the RYA's Crew Search in 1988. Through this he was appraised by a adjudication panel including Chris Law. "In a piece in The Times he described me as 'a talent to watch in the future apparently' - so that kick started me a bit," says King. While he didn't make it through to the finals, King still managed to blag his way on to the Blue Arrow 12 metre - the prize for coming out on top with Crew Search - as a grinder.

"I didn’t know much about sailing then, I’d only been doing it for six months, but I was keen to learn and at the end of that I realised I quite enjoyed it. So I called up a few friends who I’d met and asked ‘what do I do?’ and they said jump on a plane to the Caribbean for the winter and see if you can get a job on a boat." King sold everything he owned to buy a flight to Antigua and after a week walking the dock got a crewing job on a 61ft footer called Alphida. Owned by well known Bermudan sailor Kirk Cooper, a former Olympic Dragon sailor, King ended up competing in Antigua Sailing Week before heading up the east coast to race the Newport-Bermuda. The boat returned to Bermuda for a period where King was allowed to sail Cooper's Etchell.

"After that I decided that I wanted to learn to sail properly. I realised that the only way to go back to yachts later and be of value was to go to dinghies and learn those skills that a lot of guys learn when they are eight or 10. So I went back to the UK and got a job at Holt Sails at Burnham on Crouch and bought a Finn and said 'right I am going to go dinghy sailing'." With his work at Holt he was able to sail a wealth of small keelboats but packed it in after eight months to become a dinghy instructor in the West Country.



In 1992 he got another break when he began crewing for George Barker in a Soling. They competed in the last year of the James Capel Match Racing circuit. King then hooked up with Richard Merriweather to sail in the 1995 Olympic trials. Although they were some way down the results it was nonetheless a good opportunity for King to guage how well his racing was developing, inspiring him to go further. "I realised that if you want to do it well, you just have to spend time on the water."

Another inspirational figure at this time was Jesper Bank. "Mark our bowman had become friends with him so we bought Elvstrom Sails and we went to Denmark to train with the Danish team. Jesper had medals already, and yet I have never seen someone put so much effort for so little gain into another team from another country." Bank came across to the UK just before the trials and spent two weeks training with them.

After they missed the Olympic slot King moved on once again. "The match racing circuit is brilliant and I’d love to do it full time, but it is hard work. I still do occasional events, but I don’t see it as my thing. With the match racing it is a good way to keep you honest. It reminds you that there are a huge amount of good sailors who are out there doing that sort of sailing all the time. It is really good quality sailing."

Post Soling King moved to the Isle of Wight where, wanting 'a trade', he signed on to a boat building course at the island's College of Art and Technology. As a mature student he managed to swing it so that he took his third year exams at the end of the first year, passing with flying colours.



The Volvo

King then worked as a boat builder at various yards around the Solent, finally settling in Lymington with a job at Green Marine. He continued dinghy sailing, particularly in his RS 600, meanwhile his path towards becoming a pro sailor was becoming clearer. "For someone like me there didn't appear to be a career as a professional sailor. If you hadn't been to the Games or won a medal then who was going to pay you to go sailing? Then one day I woke up and that was happening anyway. They see value in you, so they pay you. To me I felt if I was going to do it, there was three choices - the Olympics, the America’s Cup and round the world."

The stakes were too high to take the Olympic route - King says he'd seen too many people fall by the wayside. The America's Cup also didn't appeal. "The other day I talked to one of the guys from one of the teams and they’d just done two weeks of two boat testing and people were reading books upwind." This left the Volvo Ocean Race.

At this stage King had sailed the Newport-Bermuda, numerous cross-Channels in RORC races and several deliveries, but admits in the scheme of things he had precious few miles. He missed out on the 1997-8 Whitbread but continued keel boat racing including some time on the Maxi One Designs sailing with Ross Field. After racing the 2000 Sydney-Hobart on the Swan 46 Aera, he went for a trial with Team News Corp, but at the same time was talking to Mike Golding about some Open 60 sailing.

"I didn’t initially get a spot with News Corp, although they wanted me to stay out and help get the new boat ready. But for me that wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I went back and joined Assa Abloy to help build the boats at Green Marine. I ended up going to Sweden with the first boat helping that get ready. Then didn’t really get anywhere on the sailing side, so I thought I’d move on and I ended up joining Mike for the EDS Atlantic Challenge."

Having had a maximum of four days at sea prior to the EDS Atlantic Challenge King went straight into this race on Golding's Open 60 Ecover, sailing twice across the Atlantic. "Also it was shorthanded which fitted my bill a bit. You have to do everything, you can’t just do one thing."

At the end of the EDS Atlantic Challenge the Volvo Ocean Race was soon to start and King made the call that whatever happened he was going to Cape Town. "Normally there is was a big transfer of crew there, so I thought I’d go and see what happened. I spoke to Neal Graham and got a job as shore crew for Assa Abloy. There was discussion of taking me on board, but they decided to go with people with Southern Ocean experience which you couldn’t argue with. At the same time News Corp approached me and asked if I was interested in joining them for the rest of the race."

King signed up with Jez Fanstone and Ross Fields' team initially as shore crew but also as a reserve crew, with the Sea Survival course already done, ready to step in if needed. Two days before the restart in Auckland the opportunity arose and King was on board. "I was the biggest guy on board, I was mastman and helped up the front end. I didn’t do a huge amount of driving but then I’d had no tune up time and on boats like that you can’t afford to take the risk."

Getting back from the Volvo Ocean Race and now being in 'the big time' King says part of him half expected the phone to start ringing with lucrative offers. "The reality is people don’t know you’re back and you still have to call people up."

He subsequently returned to Star sailing with Jez Fanstone and signed on with Ellen's Kingfisher 2 Jules Verne campaign initially on the shore crew. "Unfortunately you can’t do both. When I did get invited to join the crew it meant I couldn’t continue the Star." The Kingfisher 2 maxi catamaran made it almost half way around the world before being dismasted in the Southern Ocean. "So I am still missing a little bit," says King. "Again that was a huge learning experience. A Dart 18 was my only cat sailing prior to that. Each time you do one of these things you learn something new which is the great thing about the sport - no matter how much you have done."

Prior to the last Volvo Ocean Race King was back at Green Marine once again helping Jason Carrington this time with the build of the new VO70, Ericsson. Ericsson wouldn't commit to him sailing on board, so once again King moved on. "Then I had a call from Paul [Cayard] asking if was I interested in meeting and talking about the Pirates project. So I met Paul and had a chat and if he was going to run it I was keen to get involved."

So 19 years from starting sailing to getting the phone call from Paul Cayard. "It was good to meet him and talk to him and from my time involved with the project I learned a massive amount about everything from seeing the way a guy like Paul operates. With him everything is up for debate. He will not make a decision until he has to. And until then he wants to go over the subject and look at every angle possible and you have to have every possible solution on the table to talk about. You can’t wing it, because if you don’t he’ll find you out because he knows so much he can question from authority as he has done so much sailing. Then there's the quality of people he brings in because they know the likelihood is that they are going to get a result. The other impressive thing about him is that he did what he said he’d do from the start. He said ‘winning the race was going to be tough from this position but second was definitely doable.’ And he came second."

Unfortunately while he helped Cayard and Kimo Worthington put the Pirates of the Caribbean Volvo Open 70 together and sailed the qualifier, King was finding it increasingly painful to sail. "The shoulder problem started from day one and to be fair a lot of it was my own fault. It is a postural thing, causing my shoulders to lift and resulting in tendonitis in my shoulders. You lose any strength in your arms. Grinding was a complete nightmare. I knew it was developing but I was too wrapped up in getting the boat to the start line to do anything about it. When we started sailing it got worse and worse. You can’t take someone who is not 100%. By the time we picked up the new rig it had got so bad I couldn’t use my right hand. Holding a pen was painful."

While sailing with the Pirates would have been a majorly big break for him, he had to pull out and take several months off trying to fix himself. "It was all to do with getting the muscles to relax and work on my posture. Now I do a lot of pilates to make sure I sit upright and relax my shoulders. Massage therapy seems to make a lot of difference and I had acupuncture which was brilliant. It definitely worked. After a couple of months I could go sailing for a day but at the end of a day I would still be in reasonable pain."

Going solo

Having sailed with Mike Golding and having an influential sister Helen who was the official voice of reason at the end the phone for Nick Moloney during the last Vendee Globe, King has been exposed to the solo offshore racing scene for some time. He says he went down to the start of the last Vendee Globe as a spectator and found himself asking himself 'do I see myself doing this?' While the answer was in the affirmative, only in the last 12 months has he felt able to push forwards with this.

Getting a project of his own off the ground has required several mental hurdles be crossed. "You suddenly realise if you want to do your own project you’ve got to start telling people about it. And the reality is that when you start telling people their reaction is amazing. The amount of people who have said ‘yeah, that’s great, you really should do this’."

He started looking at the steps one needs to take before doing a Vendee Globe and the Figaro emerged as the obvious stepping stone. "To me the Figaro is my chance to prove I can go solo, two handed and get some really good learning. It is also a chance for a sponsor to get an introduction to it if they’ve never done it at a relatively low budget. And compared to the other forms of shorthanded sailing out there the Figaro made sense because it is all about the sailors. The boats are all the same."

At present King is in the final stages of buying (rather than chartering) a Figaro and plans to be based out of La Rochelle. He is supposed to be taking over the boat on 9 Feburary and will be training out of the Pol France sailing school. Here he reckons it will be more relaxed than the famous Figaro centre at Port la Foret in Brittany. There are also good flights starting up with FlyBe directly back to Southampton.

As to the all-important money side King has managed to round up enough funding to buy a boat and go forwards, but is still searching for a title sponsor. At present he doesn't have funding for a whole year's campaign but has already started making contact with companies. "I thought I’d call up all my mates who are in business and ask ‘can I come and talk to you about it’, not 'can I have money off you', but 'can I have your advice' and that has snowballed into getting me in the door of some pretty big companies. Some of them are saying 'we can’t sponsor you but we are happy to help you'. A PR company in London has stepped up and said 'we’ll help you with some presentation training and once we are happy we’ll take you to our clients."

Getting on in France has proved easier than he thought. "When you start talking about it in Britain people say ‘oh right, you are going to do that. Well the French won’t help you, it will be hard work, it will be in a different language.’ The reality is completely different. If you walk around in England and ask something as simple as ‘can I insure a Figaro?’ once they stop laughing they say 'n,o we can’t do that'. In France they say 'a Figaro? We’ll give you a discount.’"

He plans to compete in as many events as possible this year. However first up is on the Figaro calendar is the Trophee BPE, singlehanded transatlantic race. "Initially it was ‘oh great…’ Actually the other way to look at it is to push off transatlantic for two or three weeks will be a great learning curve."

Then there is the small matter of learning French. "I have got Learn French loaded on my computer. But they are going to issue sailing instructions in English. I think from the reaction I have had in France from the sailors and the organisers, they are keen to get as many people in as possible. And the more I get to see the French sailing scene, you just think - are we missing the point? There is a huge scene going on over there and it is not that far away and actually it is not that expensive. Most of the boats we all sail on with private owners and how much money they spend on those, the Figaros are relatively cheap. Any fleet which can muster 55 boats there must be some quality there. I think it has been poopooed in England."

For King the Figaro is just a stepping stone on to an Open 60 campaign, as it has worked for Sam Davies, he is aware that it is a long term project. "It could take a year or 10 years, but I am positive and confident I can do it and can compete with those guys. Over the years with all the things I have done it makes me more suited to solo or two handed sailing than anything else. The Figaro just looks like it will be a sensible progression."

We look forward to following the progress of Walthamstow's finest over the course of this year.

Tomorrow we speak to the other new British Figaro sailor...