Risk versus reward

Second in the Barcelona World Race, Iker Martinez and Xabi Fernandez tell us what they learned and look forward to the Volvo Ocean Race

There is a new force to be reckoned with in shorthanded racing for it can be no coincidence that in the Barcelona World Race the second, third and fourth placed teams were all Spanish. Time will tell whether this new found enthusiasm/skill transfers on to the Vendee Globe or whether the Spanish sailors are only interested in sailing doublehanded, for another observation to made about this Barcelona World Race, the second time the non-stop round the world race has been held, is that it has now come of age as an event and perhaps has also properly established the sport of two-handed ocean racing. No longer is the Transat Jacques Vabre the only doublehanded event in the IMOCA Open 60 calendar – now there is an event that could one day rival the Vendee Globe as the class’ no1 event.

This race has also proved - just as Mark Turner shrewdly planned when he originally conceived the event – that is can attract top sailors from other disciplines, in particular the Volvo Ocean Race with the likes of Iker Martinez, Xabi Fernandez and Pepe Ribes, now hooked on what for them is an entirely new discipline within sailing that is less intimidating than solo sailing.

A particularly impressive display during this race was that of double Olympic 49er gold medallists turned Volvo Ocean Race sailors Iker Martinez and Xabi Fernandez, sailing Mapfre, formerly Michel Desjoyeaux’s Foncia, the Farr-designed winner of the last Vendee Globe. Her crew arrived in Barcelona a week ago look decidedly svelt – Fernandez having lost 17kg and Martinez 10.

“It was good fun,” Martinez admitted to us of their race. “Obviously there were some moments when you think ‘what are we doing here? I’d rather be at home’, but overall it was very nice. Xabi and myself are good friends. We have been sailing together in a lot of very good races and got a lot of good results, but there’s been so much time sailing together doing the same thing and it gets a little bit, not boring, but it is always...the same. So it was like ‘we can keep sailing together’ - which is what we want, but at the same time we can do something different. So it was nice. We were enjoying it a lot and it was good fun – suddenly something happens and Xabi is on the helm and I have to go to the bow - so doing it completely the opposite way around to the last 10 years! And we managed to finish the race and not to stop and everything so that was our goal and we are very happy and we learned a lot about the boat.”

But ‘fun’ in fact is not the most appropriate word, for discreetly their Barcelona World Race campaign and their preparation before it, was carried out with the same Germanic precision as they tackled the Olympics and the Volvo Ocean Race - and is presumably one principle reason for their twin Olympic gold medals in Athens and Beijing. These two are very very serious sportsmen.

This has come about possibly because one point Xabi Fernandez dropped out of sailing for four years to become a cyclist. As Martinez puts it: “I think cycling is one of the hardest sports - I really have a lot of admiration for these guys - and it taught him about your personal limit. And his personal limit is extremely high and he has been teaching me that for a long time when we have been doing some sports. I started cycling with him - we were doing a lot of cycling, running and aerobic things – that’s important for the Olympic classes but it is also very important for this kind of race. It is very impressive. You can be tired, cold, no food and he can keep going for much longer. We were talking sometimes about how the body can find a way to keep going when you’re like that. It is like there is no battery in the telephone and it keeps going for five days...”

Martinez adds that his ex-cyclist 49er crewman is also less impulsive than he is. “I try to stop myself from going too fast. If I think two times [about something], he thinks three times. It doesn’t matter if he knows it is important, even it is important he knows that if you do something ten times, once you are going to do it wrong if you don’t think about it before.” So the old adage: Less haste, more speed.

While it happens occasionally, such as Torben Grael competing in the Volvo Ocean Race with his Star crew, generally examples of Olympic duos continuing on together into yacht racing are extremely rare. So how have they managed it? “I think we survived because we are both very open minded,” says Martinez. “Like the engineering, when we started [on Mapfre] it was like: ‘oh, look at this mast – no spreaders, didn’t see that before! We’ll have to learn. How is this working? Okay go.’ And how not to drop the mast in the South? Be careful of the tension on the lower shroud. Okay good, etc.... And we were learning very fast. We are not only thinking about what we know and what we understand. We are not afraid to go for new things.”

Mapfre was the first boat they have sailed with a spread-free rotating wingmast and Martinez says that while they were completely sceptical of it to start with, they are now completely converted. Why? “For me it is pretty simple. Normally when a mast breaks it is not due to the tube but the fittings. This happens 95% of the time. You don’t have fittings on this mast – everything is rope. Because you don’t have fittings you have to make a mistake to drop the mast – which is also very easy, so you have to be careful with the forestay with the tension and the runner. But at least you have control of this, it is your responsibility.”

Martinez and Fernandez, who have been sailing the 49er together for 14 years, also know each other extremely well, particularly how each other reacts in crisis situations – no need to be nice and polite, etc – and this would have been an advantage over their competitors in the Barcelona World Race. “This is racing, the boats are very nice, it is more or less the same. It is like runners who do the 400m and then they go for the 10000m. It is different, but it is the same sport” says Martinez.

For their Open 60 campaign the Spanish duo acquired the use of the former Foncia, along with the coaching services of her skipper, the world’s most accomplished singlehanded offshore racer, Michel Desjoyeaux, who worked with them over January until March last year. “Every day with him is like gold. You have to learn as much as you can. We sailed in the Figaros and stayed in his house,” recalls Fernandez. “The first thing he taught us was that the sailing is the easiest thing. It was about how to think and how to approach the problems and how to prepare.”

But throughout the Barcelona World Race they were still on a steep learning curve.

Typically sailors coming from a background of fully crewed racing, struggle mentally when going shorthanded because it is a constant frustration not knowing how hard and when to push. Martinez reckons that there is a divide at around 20 knots of wind: below that the crew can work at 100% but the boat isn’t going at 100% of its potential, while above this the crew isn’t going at 100% because it not worth trying to achieve more. They have made the mental leap by rationalising it, as Martinez says: “Sometimes you look at the boat and say ‘if we could do something more and be faster...’ But that is the moment you have to be patient and think ‘the other guys – they are like us’. They cannot do more. This is the maximum and we’ll have to stay there and if not we are going to break something and this will finish it.” Or you have to redefine what represents 100% doublehanded on an Open 60.

Martinez says that they really learned some of the vital risk v reward lessons outbound down the South Atlantic. “The boats are completely different from the Volvo - they are much lighter and wider, but have less stability and they like to sail fast and high doublehanded. These boats don’t like spinnakers so much, they like much more the jibs. It is impossible to imagine going downwind in the Volvo with a jib, but here you can think about it. These kind of things were difficult at the beginning but then we saw them and you have to be open minded. If you go into it like the Volvo it is not going to work, because if you don’t drop the spinnaker t,he spinnaker is going to drop in the water anyway, which is what happened to us in the South Atlantic. Then you have to spend four hours sorting it out and you lose 40 miles. So using the jib in that instance is like gaining 40 miles. So in the Indian Ocean we were better at that and in the Pacific even better. In the end you go ‘look at that: Less sail area, we go a bit higher, but much faster and if you look overall over one day – much better and you have 50% of the problems and we can sleep! You have more time to do the meteo and then you go to the right place and you won’t miss the shift. In the end the boat was much better sailing with less sail and faster angles, more easily and much better.”

There is the added issue shorthanded of when to make sail changes, which don’t happen as regularly as they do fully crewed. This is to do with conservation of the crew’s energy and also because changes take much longer – up to 1.5 hours in some cases and in that time the conditions may have changed again. In turn this has an effect on the way they manage their routing.

This risk v reward notion is also something which Martinez reckons they can bring to the Volvo Ocean Race. “On one side you have a lot of people on board and you have to use that ‘power’, but at the same time even in the Volvo many times you put yourself in difficult situations and that is not good, for the same reasons.” He reckons that if major cock-ups happened 40 or 50 times to them doublehanded during the Barcelona World Race, then in the Volvo fully crewed it might be 10 or 15 times, but if you can reduce that to two, through being more cautious, that potentially represents a lot of time saved.

Martinez has also enjoyed the learning process sailing the Open 60 shorthanded. On a VO70 typically there are specialists among the crew when it comes to the more complex areas such as the electronics, electrics, hydraulics, engine, etc. Following the Barcelona World Race he says both he and Xabi have a much more complete understanding of all of this. In his role as skipper of the VO70 this will allow him to better comprend the nature of a problem, how important it is, how much time it will take to repair, how much ground they will lose and what effect that will have on their routing.

“It is very important to have an idea of everything and now we have that and not only in the boat systems, but also in sailing. Now I know how to do the bow, how to trim and drive – I know how hard it is to change a sheet when it is very windy, so when you are driving you know how low you have to go and how much you have to stop the boat to help this guy and make it a less risky situation.” But less risky is also faster because it can allow whatever job that needs to be done to be carried out faster. “That will be one more mile and one more.”

Generally they have enjoyed sailing their Open 60 and from their enthusiasm one gets the impression they would be keen to return to the next Barcelona World Race in three year’s time. In a new boat? Martinez says that “during the trip we were thinking we’d like to change this and that but this is working very well. So the answer is ‘why not?’ But then many things have to be in the right position to go forward. You really have to want to do this. You have families. Then you need a lot of money, so you need a sponsor. Many things have to be in the right position.”

Returning to the point we made at the start of this article, neither seems to have the slightest desire to do the Vendee Globe – Martinez, 33, describes himself as a team player, not a solo player. But never says never: “Today is not the moment. Maybe in the future. I don’t know about the future.” In the meantime their boat is returning to its original owner, Michel Desjoyeaux.

Going ahead for them, while doing the Olympics might seem an enticing option – they can defend their Gold medal and are the reigning 49er World Champions – Martinez says that doing this and the Volvo Ocean Race is not possible.

They are looking forward to the Volvo Ocean Race: “It is going to be the most difficult for a long time. The level of the teams that are there is impressive. Having Team NZ and Puma and Groupama and Abu Dhabi with Ian Walker now with experience and the Telefonica team with so much experience – only five teams and but five good teams.”

In his assessment of the competition, Martinez describes Groupama as being the 'Ericsson equivalent; this time around – with more money, more resources, more time and the winning boat from last time. “They are probably spending double the budget of the others. They bought the best boat with the best sails. They are doing everything huge, with big investment. They are doing these records, they know about big boats, or even much bigger boats. They’ve had 100+ft boats. These guys are completely different. They are coming from something very complicated and we saw that when they broke the record around the world. For me today they are the favourite because they spent more time and more money than the others.”

However Martinez by no means rules out the competition: “Team New Zealand [Camper] is a big team and they have one guy as a skipper, Chris Nicholson, with a lot of experience - we trained with him before Athens, over the last winter before in Melbourne - and he is with a lot of people who have already won the race like Stu Bannatyne and Grant Dalton knows very well how to do this.”

Puma, according to Martinez, has taken many of Ericsson Racing Team’s top assets including their sail designer and watch captains, while they got the Telefonica mast designer. And of course they came second in the last race, and so were already in the ball park.

Abu Dhabi is just behind these three but have Farr as their designer, who also designed the Telefonica boats for the last race and have a formidable background in the round the world race. “Our boat was very good, much better than people think, but we didn’t sail her very well and we didn’t prepare very well for the race. They are very good designers and this time they NEED to win the race. They need to have a good boat and they aren’t designing so many 60s and they aren’t in the AC. So they have to: That is a good position. And Ian Walker is a very good skipper with a lot of experience and did it last time and he will have a very good team.”

But Martinez reckons that even teams dotting all the ‘i’s and crossing all the ‘t’s are going to be in for a hard time. “It could happen that a team gets third again even doing everything much better but there are still two teams ahead of them because the level is much higher than last time. That can happen. Last time there was a huge difference in the level between the first and second/third. We were very close to Puma, but Ericsson was one step more."

We'll hear more about their plans when Telefonica finally make the announcement about their participation in the Volvo Ocean Race.