Yachting: Hotline home a comfort for round the world yachties

By SUZANNE McFADDEN

Amid the icebergs, monstrous waves and driving snow deep in the Southern Ocean, help is a mere phone call away.

When a cry for help went out from New Zealand skipper Grant Dalton's round-the-world boat yesterday morning, satellites helped to get assistance for a sick American sailor.

Every boat in the present Volvo Ocean Race is packed with a mass of high-tech communications systems in case of emergencies - a far cry from the early days of the race when the only communication with the outside world was a single-sideband radio.

Yesterday, Roger Nilson, the doctor on board Dalton's boat, Amer Sports One, was able to send an e-mail from 48 degrees south - 1500 nautical miles south of Australia - to the race headquarters in London requesting immediate help.

Crewman Keith Kilpatrick was suffering from an intestinal blockage and was on morphine, antibiotics and a saline drip. The Amer crew urged that he be evacuated from the boat as his condition worsened.

While the boat, sailing from Cape Town to Sydney, began heading north towards help, Kilpatrick was able to talk to his wife in California via satellite telephone.

And Nilson, a five-time race veteran who is a physician when he is on land, was phoning fellow medical professionals around the globe for advice.

Last week, New Zealand skipper Kevin Shoebridge was able to phone London as soon as the rudder broke on his boat, Tyco.

When Dalton first circumnavigated the globe 20 years ago, the rest of the world was a long way away. The racing boats checked into race headquarters only once a week on a static-plagued radio.

Now each boat has at least three different satellite communicators and two emergency locator systems if things go wrong.

"Somehow the easy communications have taken some of the romance and adventure out of the race, but it's also made the race much more accessible to people," Dalton said. "Now I can phone home whenever I want.

"We can still have communication problems. There's an area of the Southern Ocean where it's difficult for a small boat moving violently to lock on to the satellite, and communications can be patchy.

"And the electronics can fail in the harsh environment down here."

Each boat uses a Satcom B to get weather information, send and receive e-mails, and transmit video footage and photographs to race headquarters every day.

The main telephone line is the Mini M satellite, and the Inmarsat C receives e-mails and the internet.

Every 10 minutes, the Inmarsat C collects the sea colour and temperatures from tiny sensors stuck to the boats and sends it to Nasa, where it is used for the Volvo Ocean Adventure - a worldwide schools project teaching children about the oceans.

Meanwhile, the children of the round-the-world sailors are able to track their absent dads wherever they are in the world.

At St Cuthbert's College, Auckland, Eloise Dalton and Lydia Shoebridge - the daughters of rival skippers - are top of the class when it comes to lessons about the race.

Pupils at the school are following the race via the internet, and both girls are able to check their homework with the sailors when their fathers ring to say goodnight.

"Dad rings up every day, sometimes twice a day - that's when the signal is working," said 10-year-old Eloise, Dalton's elder daughter.

"I really love this race - so I don't mind if he's not home."

But 6-year-old Lydia would rather have dad Kevin Shoebridge home than out at sea.

When the race children go to meet their fathers in port, their education continues. One of the race teams, Team SEB, has set up a travelling school that operates from a tent at the docks.

When Lydia and her brother, Thomas Shoebridge, were in Cape Town last month, they took their New Zealand schoolwork to the tent every day, studying with nine other children from around the world.

nzherald.co.nz/marine