Southerly blast

Volvo Ocean Race skippers tell ROBIN BAILEY of the dangers lurking on the Cape Town to Sydney leg.

There is a salty old saying that below 40 degrees south on the globe there is no law, below 50 there is no God, and below 60 there is no mercy.

The sailors in the Volvo Ocean Race are about to discover - and for many rediscover - what horrors dwell in the Southern Ocean.

The second leg of the race from Cape Town to Sydney starts Monday morning (NZ time) and the crews know they are in for a 6550-nautical-mile roller-coaster ride through some of the worst conditions on the planet.

Grant Dalton, who has dived into the Southern Ocean more often than any other sailor in the race, describes it as being like a visit to the dentist.

"You don't like going, you hate it while you're there, but afterwards you are glad you went," says the skipper of Amer Sports One.

"With the dentist you have to go every year - I have to go to the Southern Ocean every four years."

Dalton changed that pattern this year. It's only nine months since he was last there on his giant catamaran, Club Med.

"It is a place that commands a lot of respect," says the ocean-racing veteran. "If you treat it like a windy day on the Hauraki Gulf it will bite you back."

Kevin Shoebridge, another New Zealander, who is at the helm of Tyco, says he is also wary of the polar blasts and icy waters that rise up before the Volvo 60 yachts like multistorey carparks in the middle of nowhere.

"It's such a nerve-racking place. Once you get down there it's a game of who dares wins," he says. "There are not a lot of tactical options. You can't afford to let up, but you find yourself dancing a fine line between going fast enough and being safe enough."

The VOR sailors make sure they and their boats are well-prepared.

This weekend the eight competing yachts will be packed with a whole new inventory of sleeping bags, polar clothes and smaller sails.

Tyco has gone through a "massive maintenance schedule" since arriving in Cape Town to ready the boat for a hammering in the Roaring Forties and beyond.

"We also have to prepare the crew, so we will spend half a day shut in a room talking about how we are going to sail the boat down there and how to keep the guys safe," says Shoebridge. "Ten of our 12 crew have been there before, so they know what to expect as much as you can know what's lurking down there."

Dalton says his crew, who will go into this leg in second place behind illbruck, do not have so much experience of the Southern Ocean.

"We've written a bible on boat safety things, like how to change watch in the dark, how to be totally kitted out, and how you can't make a cup of tea before you go on deck, because all the weight has to be kept aft," he says.

To ensure the safety of the sailors, the race organisers have put a waypoint in this leg. The boats must round Eclipse Island, off the south-west coast of Australia, to stop them diving too far into Atlantic waters.

Dalton, a veteran of seven circumnavigations, says racing has changed dramatically since the early days of the round-the-world race.

"In the old days, the low-pressure systems would go past you. But the boats are so much faster now that in the last race we got in a low pressure and we were fast enough to keep up with it," he says.

Last time the boats left Cape Town, Swedish Match caught a low and rode it all the way to the leg finish.

The yachts are now fitted with radar systems that can detect large icebergs, but the small ones, the lumps they call "growlers", can often surprise the sailors.

And just when the fleet seems to be out of the Southern Ocean, on the last 250 miles of this leg, they have to tackle notorious Bass Strait with its unforgiving storms and seas.

"It's a hellishly long leg," says Dalton. "But we all can't wait to get out there and race it."