ALICANTE, SPAIN // For anyone who has attended a sports mega-event such as an Olympics or World Cup, the sights and sounds and stress were familiar.
Forklifts manoeuvred around sailors, workmen operating power saws cut lumber and pneumatic nail guns fired like strings of firecrackers. Scaffolding was assembled, banners erected, sponsor hospitality tents hoisted and the final bells and whistles were put into place.
The fan village at the Volvo Ocean Race is set to open on Thursday, and the 11th-hour preparations were in full swing on Wednesday at the Alicante port, where the nine-month round-the-world regatta gets under way this weekend.
The workmen on the water were slightly less frenetic; the seafaring contingent has been assembling the pieces of their particular puzzles for months, nail by nail.
Shortly after 8.30am, when the Alvimedica boat backed into its assigned docking spot along the Mediterranean Sea and tied off the shorelines, it represented a notable moment, both metaphorically and pragmatically.
Hereafter, everything else is effectively full speed ahead.
After a couple of weeks in port for the final round onshore tune-ups and repainting, all seven racing boats were back in the water yesterday, getting ready for the first leg of the race, an in-port sprint on Saturday that should last between 45 and 60 minutes.
“We’re sort of checking everything out, going through the last things on the list,” said Simon Fisher, the navigator of Azzam, the Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing team’s boat. “Because there’s always something.”
Given the complexities of modern-day yachting, that is hardly surprising, even though some of the sailors have been calibrating the carbon-fibre racing torpedoes for months. Mix in the unpredictability of Mother Nature, the caprices of increasingly complicated boats and a cosmopolitan crew of eight scrambling seamen, and what could possibly go wrong?
Fisher’s crew, for instance, have been in Alicante for weeks and de-bugging the boat for far longer. Azzam already has been to the US, Portugal and made two trips to the UK before tooling into Spain, logging about 18,000 nautical miles, he said.
“And we haven’t really even started yet,” Fisher said.
The Alicante canvas made for an interesting dichotomy. Docked a few hundred yards from the seven colour-splashed Volvo yachts entered in the race – which will cover 39,000 nautical miles before hitting the finish line next summer in Sweden – is a classically styled, old-school wooden boat that is visually akin to what Christopher Columbus might have sailed for Queen Isabella of Spain a little over five centuries ago.
Other than their towering main masts, the vessels have little else in common. Fisher, wearing team colours with his surname emblazoned across his back like a footballer, ran through a mental inventory of the boxes that needed ticking and spent all afternoon on the water yesterday, going through the pre-race dress rehearsal.
A couple of kilometres away, the scenery swallowing Santa Barbara Castle loomed over the seaport. Surrounded by towering rock walls and perched atop a craggy bluff, its roots date to the ninth century, when Arab forces in dhows sailed the same seas and controlled the region.
The fleet of Volvo Ocean 65 boats, lined up next to each other for optimal fan viewing, are a comparative tribute to modernity.
As Simon prepared to hop aboard, he said that the keel, engines, electronics and sails required double-checking.
For good reason. Three years ago, the Azzam’s mast broke six hours into the 2011/12 edition of the race.
Sometimes, duct tape just would not do: the mast weighs six tons, Fisher said. After the in-port sprint on Saturday, the teams depart October 11 for three weeks at sea on the lengthy first leg of the race, a jaunt to Cape Town, South Africa. Ideally, nobody will have to ad-lib on the open water.
There was activity underwater, too. A couple of divers were working below the waterline, checking on the paint and clearing barnacles that had accumulated in a matter of hours. Because of issues with paint, the keel fins on the underside of the boats were stripped and repainted.
All seven were hoisted into onshore cradles at The Boatyard, the mechanical nerve centre of the Volvo village.
The teams, encamped nearby in tents and using metal storage containers doubling as offices, were stocked with drill presses, oversized sewing machines and other pieces of fix-it-fast hardware.
In terms of imagery, imagine pit lane at a Formula One race, replete with team colours, logos and a full-blown onshore team ready to swap out the tyres, so to speak. Except that, instead of fire-retardant Nomex, everybody wears shorts and trainers.
With the hours dwindling before the race begins in earnest, the dockyard symphony was eclectic. As construction workers erected the interactive entertainment areas for fans, sailors scooted around work crews on their bikes, skateboards and scooters.
Be it by land or by sea, these guys had jobs to complete, and walking is an unproductive use of time when there is a plenty to circumnavigate.
Since yesterday marked the first full sailing day in two weeks, the Abu Dhabi crew were anxious to get away from the dock.
Downwind and under the right circumstances, Azzam can reach speeds of 40 knots per hour, which in landlubber terms equates to 74kph.
“Oh yeah,” Simon said, smiling. “We’ll be ripping around a little bit.”
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