Winning around the world

Brendan Hall talks with the editor about the challenges of skippering the first Australian Around-The-World winner in the clipper.

When Brendan Hall was appointed skipper of Spirit of Australia for the 2009/10 Clipper Race, few gave him much chance of success. Not only was he the youngest of the 10 skippers, he also had the fewest miles of ocean racing. And he was up against sailors who had competed in the Whitbread (predecessor to the Volvo Ocean Race), the America’s Cup, the Solitaire du Figaro and Mini-transat races.

“One of them had 27 trans-Atlantic crossings under his belt, to my three,” said Hall. “The talk amongst the crew and supporters before the race had definitely singled out a few strong favourites and I wasn’t one of them.

“In my own mind, I had to keep telling myself that I was as good as any of the other skippers. I knew I was far more prepared than any of them. I had spent the last 18 months researching ocean conditions, collecting polar data for the boat and getting advice from past race skippers. I knew this preparation would give me a big advantage when it came time to build my crew.”

Unlike the Volvo, which attracts the best professional ocean racers in the world, the Clipper crews pay for the opportunity to take part. While some have been good club racers and may even have done an ocean race like the Sydney-Hobart, most have little or no sailing experience. To make the situation even more complicated, not all of them sign up for the whole trip.

“On every leg, about half the crew on board were ‘leggers’, meaning they were only doing that leg of the race. One of our fundamental values on the boat was to quickly integrate the leggers into the team and get them up to speed on how we perform our evolutions and monitor performance data,” said Hall.

“It was a strange dynamic, as the round-the-world crew became very experienced and knowledgeable, but were getting tired and losing enthusiasm as the race went on. The leggers, though they were relatively inexperienced, brought a fresh burst of energy and new stories and jokes to tell. Our system was to ‘buddy’ a legger to a round-the-worlder and they would take the first two or three days of a leg teaching and training them on their particular specialist role. On the whole it worked well and in fact, we got our best results on leg 6, from San Francisco to Jamaica, scoring 23 out of 23 points, with the greatest number of inexperienced leggers. So it just goes to show that attitude and persistence are as important as raw sailing skill in ocean racing.”

The right stuff

All 10 Clipper boats were identical, meaning no team had an edge in equipment. Skippers have to find another way to win.

“I have always believed that persistence is the key to success and I made that word the focal point of our campaign. Around the boat, we had quotes from great leaders and the theme of all of them is persisting and never giving up,” he explained.

“On every leg, we saw the same pattern. In the first three days of every race, all 10 boats were pushing their hardest. The fleet was close so there was constant motivation to race hard and push the boat. In these conditions, we were no faster than anyone else. Same is true of the last three days of any race, as the fleet converges and with the finish in sight, everyone is motivated and sailing hard.

“It’s in the middle part of the race, be it 10 days or five weeks where we always edged in front. When there are no other boats around to spur you on and it’s the middle of the night and the water is freezing cold, it’s easy to lose motivation and not change headsails or hoist the spinnaker and drop off the pace. It was in that middle part of the race, when other boats were slowing down that we didn’t. We kept going at the same pace and pushed equally hard the whole way through. We weren’t any faster, we just didn’t slow down. Our persistence and energy to drive the boat hard all of the time was the single biggest factor in our success.”

Brendan says the Clipper race is definitely a case of attitude over aptitude.

“I would much rather have somebody on board who is inexperienced, but has a strong work ethic, is keen to learn and gets on well with people, than somebody who is an experienced sailor with no people skills. People skills are absolutely key in this race. Before the race, I got my whole crew to read the book ‘How to win friends and influence people’ and I think the lessons in that went a long way. Ask any crew member or skipper from a past Clipper race and they will tell you that the sailing is really the easy bit. It’s the challenges of keeping a confined community of 18 people happy and motivated under pressure that is the hardest part.”

Looking after the boat

“The other critical factor was our focus on preserving our sails and gear. The old ocean racing adage holds true that to finish first, first you have to finish. We were always the first boat to reef down our mainsail and change down our headsails as the wind built. We never pushed our spinnakers beyond their wind ranges and in every stopover, we spent a day inspecting and repairing our entire sail wardrobe. This conservative approach served us very well in the closing stages of the race because all of our sails still had a good shape and our spinnakers were all intact. Other boats in the fleet had hugely stretched out headsails and only one out of their three spinnakers intact. We looked after our kit and it looked after us,” said Brendan.

While ocean racers don’t hold the Clipper in the same regard as the Volvo because of the amateur or “paid” crew component, to skipper the winning boat by such a huge margin has given Brendan a lot of credibility as an ocean racing skipper. He s now considering his options for making ocean racing his career.

“I have sent letters to some of the teams entering the next Volvo Ocean Race and I am making progress with one of them. With their new under-30 rule, I think I could bring a lot to a VOR team. The VOR is definitely the pinnacle of professional ocean racing and it has always been my goal to do that race.

“I would also love to do a Sydney-Hobart in the next few years, it’s just a case of getting to know the right people. I am at heart an ocean racer – so this is what I would love to keep doing.”

Clipper Ventures, the company founded by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston to organise the Clipper races, is now calling for expressions of interest for people wanting to crew in the next event, which starts next August. While the only Australasian stopover in the last race was in Geraldton, WA, the 2011/12 race will also stop in New Zealand and on the east coast, giving some short sprints across the Great Australian Bight and the Tasman Sea.

Anyone interested in crewing either for the whole race or to become a “legger” should go to the event website, www.clipper.com for details.