Volvo junkie

Chris Nicholson talks about his third Volvo Ocean Race, racing the TP 52 Cristabella and his new foiling Moth

The last few years have seen 37 year old Chris Nicholson do what he says he never thought he'd do in making the transition almost totally from being a professional dinghy sailor to being one of the world's most sought after keel boat racers.

Having won three 49er World Championships back to back in the late 1990s, the quietly spoken Australian was fully initiated into the big boat world in 2001-2 when Grant Dalton persuaded him to be one of the drivers on board his Amer Sport One.

Since then Nicholson has not looked back. He competed in the last Volvo Ocean Race on board Bouwe Bekking's movistar and this time will be globetrotting again, with Ken Read's Puma although this is not official yet. As part of the training campaign with Ken Read's team Nicholson will be spending much of this summer racing with Read on board George David's maxi Rambler. They have already competed in the HSH Nordbank blue race and are at present gearing up for the Rolex Fastnet Race in August and then the Maxi Worlds in Sardinia. Between these events Nicholson is shoe-horning in some TP 52 racing as back-up helmsman on board John Cook's Cristabella. All the while he is itching to get home to Lake Macquarie, just north of Sydney, to try out his new Bladerider foiling Moth that was delivered earlier in the year but he has yet to sail.

"Originally I wanted to race it, but honestly with the schedule now, it is going to be for fun," says Nicholson of his virtual Bladeriding. "Once you get the hang of it and can handle the boat...if I had the time I would go and race it for sure. Originally I was planned on going to the Moth Worlds, but then I reckoned I would get in about two hours training in the period beforehand. So Lake Garda in the breeze there…I decided against it. And the Transatlantic clashed with it..."

Before buying the Bladerider Nicholson says he sailed Rohan Veal's prototype a few times and was just staggered. "It is such a new sensation. You sail so many boats in this sport that you don’t think you’ll ever see another boat where you are a complete and utter novice. But that’s one of them. I remember thinking that before I got in it and that’s how it was and for me it was a nice sensation to have. You get too used to getting on pretty much any sort of boat and being able to sail it competently pretty quickly. But it was really enjoyable. I loved it. It’s been years... It’s like learning to windsurf again. It is a good experience."

And a lot of wipe-outs? "I had some huge ones! The sort of ones where water runs out of your nose for the next six hours!"

And there are a lot of good guys getting them? "For sure. Charlie McKee - we had a couple of emails a few months ago. And that was enough - he and Jonathan his brother got them. So it’ll be all the old 49er guys back in them..."

After finishing seventh in Athens in the 49er, Nicholson and his partner Gary Boyd (no relation to thedailysail partnership of Nicholson and Boyd we hasten to add...) stepped back into the 49er for Sydney International Regatta last year where they finished second. However Nicholson was not so enamoured with it. "There’s always the challenge of trying to win, but the actual boat and sailing it wasn’t very challenging and I didn’t find it that simulating. But I've probably sailed a 49er for five or six years in total - that’s a lot and I probably tend to get a little bored."

Presumably the 49er could be turboed? A carbon fibre mast was recently unveiled for the Olympic skiff in Cascais and another suggestion has been to lightened the wings. Nicholson reckons they should look at a two man foiler. "The sport has all the capability to jump to a level where the public will come and see it. I’m hoping that the foiling Moths will get into the Olympics. There is nothing around which turns heads like a foiling Moth does. So why not develop a bigger Moth? As exciting as the 49er is if the sport is ever going to be competitive in an Olympic arena we should be going to the latest boats. I know the all the problems they have with tradition and moving classes forwards - the 49er, Tornados, etc look great but there are some boats in there that don’t assist our sport for the general public. They might be great for us to sail but that is not always the most important thing."

Back to professional life and this week Nicholson is in Porto Portals, Majorca TP52ing on Cristabella. Nicholson is new to the Breitling MedCup this year and admits his experience sailing around the cans in keel boats is more limited than it might be, even though he has raced Farr 40s a lot in Sydney.

"This is a new class to me and it is taking me a while to learn how to get the boat going," he says of racing on Cristabellawhere aside from being John Cook's back-up helm for the coastal races (the only occasion someone other than the owner can steer on owner-driver boats) he also is strategist. "You think you are doing well on targets, and you think you are matching the boat beside you and they squeeze out another third or half a length to the layline and that’s enough for them to finish in the top five and for you to finish in the top 10 or 15..."

Coming from the Volvo Ocean Race Nicholson thinks they are rather overstaffed on board too. "If we had 10 or 11 in the crew they would probably be the best yacht period to race."

But while he gets to grips with a big keelboat class full of America's Cup sailors and every bit as competitive as the Olympic-level sailing he is used to, the main gig at present for Nicholson is the next Volvo Ocean Race.



As part of the Puma team's crew training for the Volvo Ocean Race skipper Ken Read has joined forces with George David to race David's new maxi boat, formerly Neville Crichton's water ballasted Alfa Romeo/ Shockwave, now renamed Rambler. Since David acquired the boat earlier this year the bulb has been shifted and a new sail wardrobe put on board include a square top main, etc. "The boat’s looking as good as I’ve seen it," says Nicholson. "It’s a big advantage to me, sailing on a 90 footer, because then you go back and sail on a Volvo 70 and all of a sudden the sails feel almost manageable, but on the 90 footer… it’s a big big boat."

Nicholson says he also enjoys the fact that the boat has pedestal winches rather than push buttons, a sentiment widely felt through the industry we are finding. "I don’t like push button sailing.," Nicholson admits. "It is quite impressive to see eight or ten co-ordinated grinders and what they can do on board and it is a skill I hope we don’t lose in our sport. No one seems to speak out one way or the other about it. You draw the line when you see it take away valuable people in the sport - the grinding side. But it is hard where you limit it. If you use canting keels it reduces crew numbers too..."

The Rambler crew give some indication of who may end up on the Puma VO70. Ken Read is obviously driving, as is Nicholson who is also a watch captain with a man who is set to be the veteran of the next round the world race, Earl Williams. Wouter Verbraak is navigating. Justin Ferris is one of the trimmers. Impressively Rambler has six world class bowmen in Peter Dorean, Ian Gordon, ex-Pirates Jerry Kirby and Justin Clougher along with ex-ABN AMRO Two crew Andrew Lewis and George Peet. Generally they sail with 19 offshore and around 25-30 inshore.

For Nicholson this will be his third Volvo Ocean Race and he is still finds it as compelling as ever. "It is such a unique race and it tests you in so many areas, you end up hooked on it. At this stage of my life I plan on doing a fourth. I am 37. I figure I have still got two physically very competitive races to do and that’s what I want to do. The boats are pretty cool now and I just enjoy having worked to a level within a team where I can contribute a lot to it."

After the last race which was a pretty much a walk-over for Mike Sanderson's ABN AMRO One, this time the race should be closer Nicholson reckons. "At times it was quite close in the last one, but then there were the breakages and what not. This next time will be more consistent and more of a boat race. It is such an experience, like trying to keep the boat and the team together for that duration such a long race period with the build-up. And every day is so dramatically different to the last and the next and it is ever evolving. You could say the same about each classes, but there is so much logistic involvement which directly impacts your result. There are so many areas. It is like running my Olympic programs, but on a bigger scale."

While Mike Sanderson's campaign got the edge last time thanks to their crew, their design, etc it was mainly through having extra time on the water compared to the other teams that paid off in the end. In this respect the team to beat for the 2008-9 Volvo Ocean Race will be Ericsson, who were first out of the blocks with John Kostecki skipper and Juan Kouyoumdjian designing for them exclusively. "They have bought the guys they wanted to. They got the designer of the winning boat from the last race. They’ll have a two-three boat program. Of course they are the team to beat," admits Nicholson.

Obviously the next Volvo Ocean Race is on a radically different course, losing the first Southern Ocean leg in favour of visiting India and the Far East. "I guess I'm greedy - I'd like to have it both ways - I’d like do the right thing commercially and go up through Asia but I also want to sail both legs of the Southern Ocean," says Nicholson of this. "So to get one leg in the Southern Ocean, it is okay, but I like the sprint from Cape Town to Australia. Equally I'm happy to go up to Asia if that gets us some more boats."

From his perspective a hardship of the next race will be the schedule. "I have been looking through it pretty closely and the time off for sailors, the ability for sailors to either fly home to their families or families to go to some pretty out of the way places - it could be telling. And then during some of our breaks there is an inshore race right in the middle. Last race was pretty damn intense and this race has gone up another couple of levels. The stopovers are shorter and there’s more of them. And it is over a longer duration and another 7,000 nautical miles of sailing. It probably will make it harder and you may enjoy it more, and you see that in all professional sports now: they are demanding more from the athletes, more games of basketball, more games of baseball. It is a long year for sailors in this race. It is going to be pretty tough for them and their families."

With Juan K and Farr exclusively signed with Ericsson and movistar respectively, Puma have chosen Botin & Carkeek to design their VO70. But with the course change is it likely we'll be seeing a change in the style of boats? "With the lighter airs you might see the water line beam a little different. That is pretty much a given in the fleet. Twin rudder v single rudders? Probably err towards twin rudders, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see couple of single rudders."

Another significant change on board for the next race will be the addition of a media person. Nicholson wholeheartedly welcomes this: "I think it is great. I think is singularly the best rule change they have done in the race. They won’t be allowed to do any contribution to sailing. That is a smart as well. They have to remember what their job is on board and so do the sailors. They are not part of the sailing team, but are there to film the race. And it’ll be so good for the race because so often the best on board is when we are too tired or too busy to do anything about it. And now we have some mad man that you can just say ‘you’ve got to film this’. That is one concern to keep the cameraman safe."

However exactly what they are and aren't allowed to do on board remains to be seen. Will they be allowed to cook for the crew? Will they be allowed to help move the gear around down below? It would seem some resentment may grow between the media person and the rest of the crew if this isn't the case "I think they should be required to do their share down below," says Nicholson. "I don’t expect to have all my food cooked but I don’t expect to have to cook his the whole way through."

One can easily imagine the media spot on a bucking Volvo 70 being one of the world's worst jobs - confined below trying to edit while keeping your lunch down, filming when you probably least want to, etc. However no doubt there will be many crew only too happy that they no longer have to do it...