Back on the Volvo trail

The Daily Sail caught up with former Tyco skipper and OneWorld team member Kevin Shoebridge

Kevin Shoebridge has a very unique set of credentials as a top figure within our sport. For most of his working life he has been flitting from America's Cup to Whitbread/Volvo and back again, sailing the former mostly with Team New Zealand (although he was with OneWorld this time round) and the latter with Peter Blake and Grant Dalton, before heading his own campaign with Tyco in the last Volvo Ocean Race.

He says he left Team New Zealand because he wanted to pursue the Volvo and Team New Zealand said they needed a full time commitment, whereas the deal with Peter Gilmour allowed him to join OneWorld immediately after the Volvo Ocean Race finished in June last year. He move to his new job at OneWorld at the same time as Tyco crewman and sailmaker extraordinaire Grant Spanhake.

After a promising start in the round robins OneWorld never seemed to up their game as all around them - particularly Oracle who eventually dispatched them - did. Shoebridge says that although there was huge depth within the team, the chemistry on board was not quite right. "A lot can be attributed to things stopping when the spending was cut back on sails. Then we were late getting our combination together on the boat. Sometimes we sailed brilliantly. Sometimes we were a little less than good."

Having had a few weeks off now, Shoebe is now back on the Volvo campaign trail.

There was a collection sign of relief in Volvo circles when Alinghi won the Cup and took it to Europe. They will be holding it - most believe - in 2007. This is good for the Volvo Ocean Race as if Team New Zealand had won and decided to hold the next Cup in 2005, the two event would have directly conflicted.

Sponsor hunting will be hard with a world upside down through economic crisis and war and it is unlikely it will be as easy as it was last when Tyco had decided they wanted to do the race and he was chosen as skipper. Following the financial strife within the Bermudan-based company and the charges brought against its former chairman Dennis Kozlowski who was indicted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission of taking $315 million in 'improper loans' from Tyco,

Shoebridge says everything has "well and truly dried up" at Tyco on the sailing front, but he believes his best option is to persuade an America's Cup team to do the Volvo Ocean Race. "I think that has great appeal for both teams. Because the America’s Cup is four years away, it is a good opportunity to give the sailing team some focus instead of testing mindlessly for years. It is a good opportunity to use your design team, your builders. You have already got these guys on the pay roll anyway so for not a huge amount more of your overall budget you are exposing the team and the name around the world for another year and a half."

Equally he feels now that the America's Cup game is the biggest in our sport and attracts the best people. "I think you need to tap into that resource not only sail and design-wise but people-wise. So my idea would be to lean on a Cup team and use them. Especially now that you have got a one boat program you could tap directly into a two boat Cup program and transfer the development across and take your gains that way."

Despite an ACC boat being designed for inshore windward-leewards and a Volvo Ocean 70 for hammering around the world in all conditions, Shoebridge believes there are similarities between the two animals. "They have similar-sized rigs. You could draw parallels for sure with your asymmetric sails and your mainsails. But I think it is just good to exercise everyone's brains and get them sailing other boats as opposed to Cup boats. After you’ve been sailing them for a couple of years, just going them up and down does get a little mind numbing. So I think it is quite important to get the guys out there doing different things."

Shoebridge says he was amazing by the amount of interest in the round the world race from his colleagues at OneWorld. "It does have huge appeal and interest. A lot of the guys can’t get over the two year commitment thing, But with the new format and one boat testing there is an opportunity to get these guys in, rotate people through a lot more. There is the short course racing in the ports, so there is just more opportunity to use expertise from the Cup and I think it has got to be beneficial for both groups."

Shoebe during one of the hair raising moments of the last Volvo Ocean Race



In general he is pretty happy with the new Volvo Ocean 70, although he was one of the advocates for using G class maxi-cats or much bigger monohulls in the race. "I think they have done the right thing with the boats. Personally I would have liked to have seen it a bit bigger, but I think for trying to keep the budgets down they are probably the right size. I think they will be an incredibly exciting boat. I would have liked to have seen a few more people on board it. I think nine is a little light. It is in that area of not being able to sail at 100%, so that is going to be a hard one. You are going to be trying to push it with very few people, three or four people on deck and it is a big boat still, so that’s going to be interesting."

The solution will obviously be for the organisers make the use of roller furling mandatory for headsails. "I agreed with that. To make it optional will open up a whole barrel of worms, not only performance-wise but money-wise. They should just say everyone has roller furling and be done with it. And I think if everyone has roller furling then the boats are going to be a lot more manageable. The sail restrictions are good and there is not a lot of scope there to put a lot of sails on board. But I think if you are going to sail with nine people, roller furling is a must."

The new breed of VO70, with canting keels and less crew will be quite different animals to the previous VO60, so does that mean going to Farr Yacht Design is still the obvious choice? "It is interesting. It is a whole new ball game so you are starting from scratch. So your development costs are going to be quite expensive up front in terms of R&D on the design. I haven't seen the final parameters of the design yet so I guess a lot of it depends upon if any of it is directly applicable to the Open 60 class. So maybe there are some parallels that can be drawn there and some experience with designers that’s already available."

But the fact is, he is most likely to return to Farr. "What they’ve done in the past is that they usually go in and start the research on their own back, hoping that they’ll get some orders. I think they realise that this is the period of time we need and realise that teams may not be together by then, so they go ahead anyway. Even last time they did that. They got going well before we are ready and you basically buy into that start-up package and carry it on."

He is likely to be looking closely at Jean-Pierre Dick's new Virbac, the new Farr Open 60 being launched at the Alinghi base in Auckland this weekend. "The good thing is that it really does open up the whole design race again. I just hope there is enough interest to get a fleet of 10 boats together so we have a good race."

Budget-wise he thinks it will be much the same as last time. "Budget is a funny thing because you hear all these numbers bandied around - $10-25 million for the last race and it just depends on what is incorporated in that. I think you could probably do a very good programme for about $12 million this time. My initially shot is around $15-16 million, but that is everything you’d ever need. And that is pretty similar to what we spent on Tyco.

"The thing with Volvo is that they have tried to keep it commercially viable which I think they have. I don’t think the spend has increased from four years ago which has got to be a good thing. I think their plan was to make a team competitive team for $10 million and I think you still can be. The biggest thing is cutting down on the time. The time is the thing which costs money. Whether you run a programme for two versus three years – that’s your expense. The boats are going to be more expensive because they are bigger and your design costs are larger, but you have only got one of them. And the sail budget will be less expensive and you’ve got less people, so all that is pretty good."

Ideally Shoebridge says you should have got the money by the end of the year in order to get working on the design in early 2004, building by May and sailing by early 2005. He thinks that getting an Open 60 to sail while the boat is in build would be a good idea in particular to get used to racing a boat with a swing keel. "That's a new ball game for most of us. But with the water ballast out and the lack of sails, they should be a simple nice boat."

If Shoebridge doesn't get the money, then it is easy to imagine someone with his huge experience being snapped up rapidly by someone who does.