Tommy Boy talks

The Daily Sail talks to Around Alone's overwhelming class two leader Brad van Liew

American Brad van Liew is in the unique position of being the only person in Around Alone who has done the race before, thereby earning himself considerable gravitas and cred within in the unique family community of this race. There are no shortage of former and future competitors lurking around Tauranga Marina at the moment from Kanga Birtles to Alan Nebauer (whose boat van Liew sailed four years ago) to Josh Hall and Jean-Pierre Dick whose new Open 60 everyone here is waited with baited breath to see - for it is the first Open class offering from Farr Yacht Design and is due for launch mid-March from Cooksons.

Van Liew's Groupe Finot-designed Open 50 Tommy Hilfiger Freedom America (formerly Mike Garside's Magellan Alpha) was pre-race favourite for class 2 and has well and truly delivered the goods so far. On the last leg Brad came close to beating several class one Open 60s into Tauranga.

"The race is going exactly as we planned it, but this race is so full of variables - everything is going almost too well," he says. But this race has a strong history of boats and skippers who thought they had it in the bag only to have had terrible disaster befall them in the later stages of the race.

Van Liew is wise to this: "The strategy is not to break the boat. When you get your bit between your teeth you end up putting the hammer down a bit which I want to try and avoid. I want to take a very conservative northerly route through the ice area. I don’t have to win this leg. I don’t want to push too hard, but saying that the boat wants to go a certain speed - I won’t push it faster than that but I’d like to do as well as I can without taking any risk." The art of singlehanding in a nutshell: tiptoeing down the fine line between performance and security.

Aside from this leg containing ocean racing's greatest landmark - Cape Horn, the main concern for competitors is ice. "For the Southern Ocean there aren’t many good places to get good information. The only information you do get is about significantly huge bergs, so little shit is totally untrackable," says van Liew. "At the moment is looks like it is down from the experience the Volvo boats had, but up from the experience we had last time. The problem is – it is not a historical data thing because it is changing down there so much. There was that huge piece which broke off a couple of years ago."



While in Tauranga the Tommy shore team led by Jeffery Wargo has been giving the boat - probably the fastest Open 50 around at the moment - a complete overhaul. "We had minor stuff break," says van Liew of the drama encountered on leg 3. "We had a runner break – I was really lucky I was on deck when it happened so the rig didn’t go away. I definitely burned up one of my lives there though…

Othan than that it has been a programme of preventative maintenance. "As long as you can stay in front of the power curve on the list then you have time to do preventative. So we’ve replaced all the running rigging in this port. Samson Ropes came on as a sponsor. The boat has been out of the water, the rig has been out of the water, all the rigging was checked, the keel was disassembled, rudder and steering was all taken out. So the boat was completely inspected."

Eight years ago saw the tragic loss of much loved British competitor Harry Mitchell on this leg - Mitchell simply disappeared without trace in the middle of the Southern Ocean - neither boat nor skipper were ever recovered. Van Liew believes that since those days the sport has become much safer. "It is a dangerous sport, whether it is doing the Route du Rhum in a trimaran or the Vendee Globe – there is inherent risk in doing something as radical as what we’re doing. But the sport is in a pretty good spot at the moment. The IMOCA rules have really worked from a safety point of view. The success rate of keeping people alive is getting better and I hope that that persists. I would love to see all these guys get around the world."

Post race, van Liew is still looking at his options. He became a father only a few months prior to the start of Around Alone and the lure of the sea, is perhaps diminished slightly as a result.

"There are a few opportunities that Meaghan [his wife] and I are discussing. My basic philosophy is that I can’t do what I did last race with full abandonment of anything that made any sense and say I’d be here again and have to sacrifice everything – I can’t do that again. Meaghan and I are too tired to do that again. I am interested to keep racing and a lot of it depends upon if Tommy want to keep going. This was intended to be a one off thing. Odds are that is what it will be. Saying that they are really happy – so I don’t know. The other thing is other jobs in the industry, the Open boat industry."

For the first time van Liew has admitted to us that he would like to do a Vendee Globe, although the next one seems unlikely.

"It would be a nice crescendo to my career," he says of the non-stop solo round the world race. "There is a lot of petitioning for Jeantot about allowing 50s into the Vendee Globe, but if I do it, I’d like to do it in a 60. If I continue it’s time to go play with a 60. This is a major event with a separate class whereas the Vendee is not. I don’t do these races just to do them. I do them to win them."

Having won class two by a big margin on every leg to date, van Liew currently holds a four point lead over his nearest rival - Tim Kent's Everest Horizontal. He is on winning form, but as the man says it is not over until it's over.