Toughest job on board

We speak to Ericsson 4's Guy Salter about the new media crewman spot on the Volvo Ocean Race boats

One of the most significant new features of the 2008-9 Volvo Ocean is the role of the 11th person on each of the boats - the media crewman.

According to the job description, this individual must send back a daily quota of words, photos and video from the race course, but must not be active in the sailing of the boat in any way. In addition to their media responsibilities, they can cook, but not all meals and they can move their own gear around.

So – a nice ride round the world as a passenger? Far from it. The role is potentially one of the toughest on board. Firstly it hasn’t been done before, so there is no precedent. But perhaps hardest of all is the relationship with the crew - when it is all turning to custard on board the media crew is unable to help, no doubt with the potential to breed resentment among the rest of the crew. In addition their role is designed to be intrusive, to catch those moments that have only rarely been seen from on board in the past, be they personal (how the crew are feeling) or physical (boat/gear breakage). In many instances there is the conflict of interest between recording what happens in a purely journalistic way, both the highs and lows, the good parts and bad, while at the same time not falling out with the crew or the team sponsor.

Typically of course this relationship can only work with the full co-operation of the crew who’s mindset is solely focusing on winning a yacht race, not in the distraction of making ‘good TV’.

The media crewman must also be comfortable with being on board, including long stints in the cramped confines down below - where they will probably spend even more time than the navigator, as they edit video and stills ready to fire these back to base. To give an example: the media crew is expected to send back in the order of three minutes of video each day and as this race is being shot entirely in High Definition, even with Fleet Broadband that operates at around 500KB/sec (more than three times the speed of what was available in the last race) it still takes 20 minutes to send back 1 minute of video. In short, the media crew must come with a stomach of iron.

One of the first to sign up to this potential monster of a job was the Isle of Wight’s own Guy Salter who is currently on board Ericsson 4. Salter is very familiar with the round the world race having sailed as bowman on Tyco in the 2001-2 race and comes with huge experience in offshore yacht racing.

Salter is in the unique position in the race of sailing with another family member - brother Jules is Ericsson 4’s navigator. While the duo don’t come as a package, they do sail together a lot, most recently on board Mike Slade’s super maxi ICAP Leopard.

As to the attraction of the media crew job Salter says it interested him because he felt he had the right qualifications. Apart from his experience as a sailor, his degree at university involved studying film and photography. “And I’m not quite as flexible and fit as I used to be. So it was a good opportunity.” Plus, we suggest, it gets him out of doing the bow: “It does, but I still find myself up there probably more than I should do, filming the other boys getting pounded as opposed to being one of the pounded themselves.”

In an event that is so team-orientated, where everyone must pull their weight on board, one would think that it might be hard as a sailor not to join in, especially when things are going wrong and all the available muscle is needed on what are effectively boats that are being sailed shorthanded. “It was difficult at first,” says Salter of this. “But it is a job at the end of the day and the boys on board know they have to take someone who isn’t able to take part. I know that’s what my job is and it’s been pretty much accepted by the boys straight away. I know most of them from previous lives anyway, so it has been quite a comfortable transition. Sure, I’d like to take part, but at the same time you’ve got to try and sell the story.”

As we said earlier the trickiest element of the job is sure to be the relationship between media crewman and the rest of the active sailors on board. Salter expands on this: “They have wondered what I can and can’t do and it’s pretty much that I can’t do a lot that helps them. I just have to keep a smile on their face and make sure I mix the coffee the right way! A lot of it is down to trust for sure. You do want to be part of the team. And there will be tight moments when people are tired, when there might be a little snap or a comment, but we are big enough and ugly enough to get over that. Now they have seen some of the footage, they can see what they are trying to achieve and they are happy.”

All of the media crewmen will be trying to consolidate this relationship and the success will vary from boat to boat. On Team Russia for example 144kg Mark Covell, who happens to be the only person on board with an Olympic medal, we suspect will get pretty much whatever he wants from the crew. Inevitably there will be a few ‘stars’ on each boat. Ericsson 3 crewman Richard Mason has proved a darling of the camera in the past. One wonders who it will be on Ericsson 4.

“You pretty much know the character of the people before you get on, but you also know how they react," says Salter. "There are certain characters you’ll be looking at and other ones you’ll try and leave when they are starting to get a bit agitated. You don’t want to purposely wind them up for the sake of the story. Everyone has a different element. The decisions makers are important. If they are quiet people, they are quiet people and that will be reflected in the quiet moody scenes. I can only do what I can do. At the end of the day the story is about them – I am just a fly on the wall: catalyst or enzyme!”

So will there be any times when our man won’t film? “I’ll switch the camera on at all times. Dependent upon how I feel and how serious it looks, it might be a case of sit on it for a few hours and get back to it - tell them [the crew] what you are going to do and edit it, but I’m not expecting any serious incidents. I’m not expecting winch handles to be thrown around this time. If it is a situation like that you have to think for yourself, and for the TV program and for Ericsson as a brand. But with the bunch of guys I’ve got, they’ve spent such a long time together, it is business as normal really.”

On board Puma, media man Rick Deppe (also a past competitor in the race on board Chessie Racing, and now a professional cameraman) worked on the Deadliest Catch, a ‘reality’ TV series about fishermen trying to catch Alaskan king crabs in the Bering Sea. This is regularly being compared to what the mediamen may be able to conjure up during the Volvo Ocean Race. But just how far down the reality path will they go? “If you wanted a TV program that everyone would be switching on to it would be Big Brother, so you’d have all sorts of demographics on there, handpicked because they’re all a bit loose,” says Salter. “But it’s not like that here. The race in itself is a tough enough story – the endurance and the hardships and pushing. There’s a brilliant story in that, without worrying about people flying punches at each other, which I don’t think you are going to get.

“When you come back to those crab-catching programs, if you sit down to watch them, not a lot goes on and it is more about the people. So that is achievable for sure, even if it is not the excitement of people high 5ing and chest bumping every time they go through a scoring gate in a certain position. The decision-making is going to be interesting. The tactical side is going to be good and that will be interesting to the fans of the sport anyway.”

As to holding back footage for tactical reasons Salter says: “It depends on its severity. We know the [other] teams won’t be seeing the footage until they get to shore anyway. By that time there might be a report coming back that someone or the boat has hurt themselves, but you’ll see that on a sched. And the only time we’re likely to be uploading the information is when you are downloading the weather and that’s on a six hourly time schedule and with the three hour position scheds you are going to get an idea that something is up anyway. So people might hold it back for a few hours. At the time it might feel like the biggest thing, but when you get back to shore and they realise the coverage and the excitement and the interest it generates in the team, I don’t think there will be any problem with that. That is the important thing - making sure the boys see the footage and see what we are trying to achieve. I’ll be open with them and explain to them what I am trying to get and what we are trying to achieve, so that everyone is pretty happy with it.”

As to the gear, the boats have the same system as they had in the last race where the on board cameras automatically store two minutes of footage, so that if there is a big wipe out a big red button can be pressed recording the incident retrospectively. According to Salter the latest gear also has features so that it will start recording if the boat reaches a certain angle of heel.

“Volvo have supplied all the equipment and there are some improvements and additions people have made. It is all pretty good gear. You can’t take the greatest gear because you are going to kill it. It is a harsh environment. But there will be some good shots coming off. Pictures and the writing will be good, provided people are happy to open up. Hopefully we will be in there to fill in a few gaps where people aren’t happy to be as open. At the end of the day the public will be more interested in the crew writing reports than they will be in me. My story is one story, but people would prefer to hear Torben’s story and the decision making and rightly so. So there will be a balance of that and people on the bow or people doing it for the first time or fifth time.”

While the creation of the media crewman spot on board the boats is definitely a step in the right direction, it remains to be seen how effective they really are. A problem with the media crew is that they are still ultimately answerable to the team and their sponsor first (for example they are paid by their team) and Volvo second. Thus even with their responsibility to capture what is going on we are still likely to end up with sanitised footage and stories that are subbed or edited before leaving the boat for anything that makes the crew or sponsor look bad or stupid or that might give a tactical advantage to a competitor. But at least there should be more footage and general media coming from the boats than the pitifully small amounts that have been sent back during past races. And less sunsets, albatrosses and 'what the crew got up to in port'.