Softwar

by Matthew Symonds

  “Then this monster puff hits the boat. And the minispinnaker is gone. That’s impossible. The mini can’t break. Then I realize the mini didn’t break, the spinnaker pole lost its fitting. The spinnaker pole is no longer attached to the mast, it’s just swinging wildly through the air. That metal alloy fitting is threaded into the spinnaker pole for about a meter. A meter’s worth of three-quarter-inch metal alloy thread had just been extruded through our carbon-fiber spinnaker pole. What kind of force would that take? A hundred thousand pounds, something like that. That can’t happen, can it? But I had seen it. We’re talking about bringing up our other spinnaker pole, but the wind is rapidly clocking right—from the northeast to the east—so we set a jib instead. Soon the wind will be coming from the southeast. We’re almost to Bass Strait.

  “At the beginning of the race, just after you leave Sydney Harbor, you get prevailing winds out of the northeast. As you make your way south, the wind starts to shift around to the right. This clockwise shift is called the ‘southerly buster,’ and it rapidly takes the wind around from the northeast to southeast to the southwest. We were now well into the southerly buster, and the new wind was coming from the southeast. We had been carrying a jib for some time, and now we were hard on the wind, pointing the bow of the boat as close as possible to the direction the wind is coming from. The sun was setting, the sky was covered with black clouds, and it had started to rain. The wind was blowing over forty knots and still building. As we entered Bass Strait, the sea state got dramatically worse. The steep waves started pounding against the bow of the boat, making it difficult for me to hold my course. We ease the sheets a bit to reduce the stress on the boat, the driver, and the rest of the crew. The winds pick up to over fifty knots, and it starts raining harder. Rain and salt spray at fifty knots feels like someone is repeatedly stabbing you in the face with an ice pick. Everyone except the driver and the trimmers are facing away from the wind. The sea state is getting worse and worse. The twenty- to twenty-five-foot waves are straight up and down—they look like row after row of three-story bubbling glass office buildings. I think to myself, ‘It’s a lot worse than last time, but I can do it.’

  “The winds hit sixty knots, and the seas continued to build. The sky is black. The ocean is black. There’s no horizon. The waves I could see were huge, but I couldn’t see most of them behind the rain and spray. As we rode up a wave, the wind would increase and I’d have to compensate for the change in apparent wind angle by turning the bow toward the wind. Then the boat would fall and slide into the trough. The wind speed in the troughs was half the wind speed on the crests. I had to constantly adjust the angle of the boat. But I couldn’t see a thing, and the instruments were reacting too slowly to be of any help. I had to drive by feel. The roar of the wind and the waves made it impossible to be heard unless you screamed. Brad was trying to help me through it. He screamed, ‘Larry, head up, head up now, now!’ I screamed back, ‘I’m trying, I’m trying!’ But then, ‘I can’t do it, Brad. Take it, take it, you take it.’ I let go, and Brad Butterworth grabbed the wheel. I couldn’t drive in those conditions; I just couldn’t do it. But Brad could. Brad Butterworth is a sailing god.

  “The 1998 Sydney-to-Hobart wasn’t even a day old, and I had already been overwhelmed and beaten by the Southern Ocean. I wanted to find my limits, and I found them in Bass Strait. I couldn’t imagine conditions getting any worse, and for a while, they seemed to be getting better. I was on deck when the wind suddenly started dropping. Brad was driving, and the winds had come down to around ten knots. It was eerie. The waves were still big, but the sky was clear and you could see the stars and the horizon. I thought, ‘If I can see, I can drive.’ It seemed as if we had passed through this enormous weather front and we were now safe on the other side. We had our small storm sails up, and we weren’t making much progress in the light breeze. We were just wallowing up and down in the big waves. After about ten minutes or so of this I thought that we should set our heavy number one jib. Brad thought that we should wait a while longer, but I was impatient so I said, ‘Brad, let’s set the heavy and get going.’ Brad was still hesitant, he thought that we should leave the storm sails set, but he agreed to put up the larger jib while I headed down below to the nav station to check the satellite weather charts that were due to come in shortly.

  “Sayonara’s navigation station is located belowdecks in the aft portion of the boat right below the boat’s two steering wheels. It consists of a forward-facing bench with enough room for two, three if you really squeeze. In front of the bench are some radios and two laptop computers. I sat down next to Mark Rudiger [the boat’s navigator] as the satellite images were being slowly painted on the computer screens. This image starts to appear on the top of the screen, we can see the Australian coast, and it works its way down to where we are in Bass Strait. I just can’t believe my eyes. I keep staring at the screen. It’s displaying a circular weather formation with our boat positioned right in the middle of it. Still staring at the screen, I ask Rudiger, ‘Mark, have you ever seen anything like this before?’ He doesn’t say anything, so I turn and see him staring at the screen and slowly shaking his head. I say, ‘Well, I have. It was on the Weather Channel. It was called fucking Hurricane Helen. We’re in the eye of a fucking hurricane.’ Then all of a sudden I hear Brad up on deck; he’s screaming, ‘The wind’s coming, the wind’s coming fast, get that fucking jib down, get it down on deck now.’ The wind went from ten to over fifty [knots] in less than a minute. Unbelievable. We had sailed into the eye of a hurricane. I thought we had sailed through a front.”

  Along with everyone else, he was shocked by the ferocity of the weather conditions and physically drained by the battering and the sickness, but he was still able to come up with a steady supply of quips that Ellison himself admits sound rather smart-alecky in retrospect. But how had he coped with what must have been real terror?7

  “Fear is interesting. Everyone on the crew was loaded up on adrenaline, the fight-or-flight thing. But we were all stuck in fight mode for one simple reason: there was no place to run. When you’re busy in fight mode, you don’t have time to think about being scared. The worst time for me was when I was in my bunk trying to get a little sleep. I hadn’t slept or eaten for a couple of days. I had thrown up so often that I was dehydrated. Throwing up over and over again with nothing in your stomach feels like your guts are being ripped out. I was totally exhausted. So I wedged myself into my bunk and tried to sleep. It was hopeless. After two days of seventy- to eighty-knot hurricane-force winds the seas were massive. The waves I saw were forty or fifty feet high, but some guys on the crew saw waves higher than the top of our mast [the top of Sayonara’s mast is 105 feet above the deck].

  “The waves were so steep that we didn’t get the normal ride up the front of the wave and down and back. Instead, Sayonara would bury her bow deep into the wall of water coming at us, then the buoyancy of the boat would lift us up to the crest of the wave. It was like going up in an elevator. Then Sayonara would exit the wave and free-fall into the trough. It felt like she was being pushed off a five-story office building and landing on asphalt every twenty seconds. If guys didn’t hang on when we started falling, they would float up off the foredeck. I saw one guy up at the first spreader [more than forty feet above the deck]. Several guys on deck broke bones, one severely enough that he had to be put in an inflatable leg cast, pumped full of morphine, and strapped to his bunk.

  “Riding out the storm in your bunk was no picnic, either. Every time Sayonara would go airborne—start falling off these huge, steep waves—you’d go weightless in your bunk, then the boat would crash down into the water, crunching you back into your bunk. The impact of the boat hitting the trough sounded like an explosion. The noise below was amazing. The hull acts like a huge bass amplifier. It sounded and felt like we were being hit by explosive shells fired from the Bismarck. The bow hits the wave, we take the elevator up, we go weightless, then BOOM. Over and over, again and again. BOOM—
BOOM—BOOM. Then I see Tugboat [Mark Turner], our chief engineer, with a red Magic Marker, and he’s drawing these red circles on the inside of the hull where the bow section meets the forward bulkhead. I say, ‘Tugsy, what are you doing?’ He says, ‘I’m marking the spots where the bow is delaminating.’ I say, ‘What? The bow is delaminating? You mean the bow is coming apart? This is fucking ridiculous!’

  “I push myself out of my bunk and head back to the navigation station, and I ask Mark Rudiger to pull out a chart and show me where we are. We’re about seventy nautical miles off the northeast coast of Tasmania. The winds are out of the southwest, and we’re banging our way south on starboard tack. I want to tack the boat onto port and head west toward Tasmania. I figure if we can get close enough to the lee of the island we should get some relief from these big waves that are trying to kill us. I tell Rudiger to tack the boat. He tells me that he thinks that tacking the boat will hurt our chances of winning the race. I say, ‘We won’t win the race if we sink. Tack the fucking boat.’ Mark says, ‘Okay, I’ll go up and talk it over with Chris.’ As soon as we tack over onto port, we get immediate relief. The new angle the boat is hitting the waves is less punishing. After a few hours we start to get close to the lee shore of Tasmania, and the wind and the waves begin to diminish. We had made it through the storm. The worst was over. Then we pick up this favorable wind shift. Tacking the boat turned out to be the right thing to do for the race, too. God was smiling on us. We won the race by quite a bit. But no one really cared. We were all just glad to be alive.”

  When Sayonara arrived first across the line in Hobart, after the inevitable “What was it like?” questions, Ellison was asked if he would be coming back to defend his title. “I remember saying, ‘No, not if I live to be a thousand.’ Then I thought about it for a moment and said, ‘Hold it, wait a second, if I live to be a thousand, I’ll come back. Chris, do you want to come back with me? Mark this down, a thousand years from now, we’ll be back.’ ”

  But for now, Ellison is going America’s Cup sailing. He says, “The best thing about the America’s Cup is that they don’t sail it in Bass Strait during a hurricane. In the America’s Cup you never race in more than twenty-five knots of breeze. You just go out for a few hours, race around the buoys, and come back in for a nice seafood-and-pasta dinner. Everyone dresses up, very civilized, perfect for my old age.”

  * * *

  1. LE writes: Passing another boat in America’s Cup match racing is both difficult and rare. But I was able to maneuver USA 61 into a nice position and capitalize on a favorable wind shift. I was very pleased when we tacked and found ourselves clear in front by a boat length. There is no way Peter would willingly let me pass him. He was trying to become the number one driver on our team, and you don’t get that job by losing races to anyone, especially me. He was pissed when he got passed. He was looking to get even in the next race, and he did.

  2. LE writes: Once, right after the start of a race, Chris wanted me to sail the boat between 10.4 and 10.5 knots. He had good tactical reasons for having me do that. If the boat ever dropped to 10.3 knots or got up to 10.6 knots, I heard about it. I like that about Chris. His job is to win races, and he expects everyone to perform, me included.

  3. LE writes: I wasn’t “traumatized” by the race, but I sure didn’t enjoy it. I’d have to be an idiot to spend any more of my Christmas holidays throwing up on a sailboat. (The Sydney-to-Hobart race starts on December 26.)

  4. LE writes: The crew was simply amazing. The boat was leaping off these huge waves, but somehow they managed to put up the storm sails. Think about a rodeo cowboy trying to change shirts while riding a bull. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  5. LE writes: While I enjoy spending my own money, I still hate spending Oracle’s money. I’m very cheap at the office. We have no company planes, no company cars, no company art, etc.

  6. LE writes: I drove our America’s Cup boat quite a bit during the Louis Vuitton Cup leading up to the 2003 America’s Cup, but I never got a chance to drive against Russell. I sure would have liked to have driven my America’s Cup boat against Russell, just to be able to say I did.

  7. LE writes: I remember very few quips and a lot of throwing up. I threw up so many times I lost count. I was very surprised because I never get motion sickness, not flying aerobatics, not sailing in heavy seas. But this was different. The entire crew was sick, even the guys who never get sick.

  18

  SAYONARA SWAN SONG

  July 2001

  Although Ellison will spend most of his seven-week summer vacation aboard Katana in the Mediterranean, he’s starting his holiday by flying the Citation to his hometown for the annual “Chicago Mac” sailing race. With a fuel stop at Grand Junction, Colorado, it’s a six-hour flight into Midway Airport. Despite the rigors of the weekend ahead, Ellison insists on flying the plane with Jeff as copilot. It’s a gorgeous, clear night, and the burning lights of Chicago are clearly visible an hour before we begin our descent. Although tired, Ellison exults in the view of his hometown. One of his more endearing qualities is that he never loses his capacity for excitement. Although the technical demands of flying a plane appeal to him, like many pilots he is in love with the sheer beauty of what he sees from the cockpit.

  The next morning, some fifteen Ellison family and friends have gathered in the dining room at the Ritz-Carlton, where he has stayed overnight. His sister, Doris, is there with her son Judge Jimmy Linn. Jimmy is coming on the race, and he’s already in the Team Sayonara gear: logoed caps, T-shirts, and shorts. Jimmy is an unlikely sailor, but it’s his third Chicago Mac. It’s a race that Ellison enjoys, partly for the opportunity it gives him to turn it into a family event and also because it allows him to cut a dash in front of people who knew him as a kid.

  The running joke over brunch is how appalling the food is on Sayonara, and Ellison claims to be furious with himself for having failed to take personal charge of provisioning, leaving it to the boat’s engineer/cook, Tugboat.1 On the previous year’s Chicago Mac, the food was so dreadful that it almost caused a fight. Ellison says, “It wasn’t just disgusting, it was actually dangerous. I don’t know how Tugsy managed it, but the chicken was burnt on the outside and still raw and frozen on the inside. I really thought Robbie Naismith was going to kill him, and Robbie’s a pretty easygoing guy. But first Robbie burned his mouth, then almost broke a tooth biting into the frozen part. He was convinced that Tugsy was trying to murder us. Robbie said we were going to lose the race because the whole crew was going to die of salmonella.” Ellison thinks it can’t be so bad again. But just to be on the safe side, he decides to stop off at a deli on the way to the boat and stock up on cans of sardines. It turns out to be a smart move.

  By the time we arrive at the marina, Sayonara and most of the other three hundred or so boats that will contest the 333-mile race—the world’s longest on fresh water, up Lake Michigan to tiny Mackinac Island—are a mile or two offshore, jockeying for position and making last-minute inspections before the 2 P.M. start. Even amid such an armada, Sayonara is easily identifiable. Not only is her mast taller than anyone else’s, it is made out of jet black carbon fiber. Whereas for the others, this is perhaps their most important race of the season, Sayonara is more used to competing and winning in the world maxi-yacht championships against the fastest and most expensive sailing boats ever built. In fact, after winning four out of four world championships, Sayonara has more or less killed off the class—the owners of the other boats, such as Hasso Plattner, chairman of Oracle rival SAP, are fed up spending their millions and routinely losing.

  And despite the warm sunshine, the gentle breeze, and the sheer beauty of Chicago’s skyscrapers shimmering on the shoreline, there is a quiet intensity about Ellison’s crew—it’s as if you had put down the McLaren Formula One team amid some weekend club racers. The most striking thing about the crew, almost all of whom have sailed together on Sayonara for all six of the years it has campaigned and are now part of E
llison’s Oracle Racing America’s Cup team, is that they are not young guys but grizzled veterans with lined faces and graying hair. Sayonara has won this race for the last two years, and the Chicago Yacht Club has handicapped her harshly. To win outright, she must cross the line seventy-five minutes ahead of the next most potent yacht in the race, a big turbosled named Decision that beat Sayonara once before in the Trans-Pac from Los Angeles to Hawaii.2 If we get a following wind for any length of time during the race, the sleds, with their flat sterns, are quite likely to outrun us, whereas Sayonara is unbeatable upwind. Ellison claims that she is still the fastest upwind boat ever built. The forecast is for the wind to turn all the way around the clock in the next thirty-six hours.

  I’m already hoping that it’s not going to be a long race. As Ellison promised, Sayonara is an uncompromising racing machine with almost nothing in the way of creature comforts. When Bill Erkelens takes the guests below, he warns us to try to avoid using the solitary toilet—the message is to piss over the side and shit only if you really have to. To comply with local environmental regulations, Sayonara has been fitted with a holding tank, but to keep weight down it’s relatively tiny—certainly too small to deal with the digestions of twenty-four men if it’s a slow race. The second shock is the realization that there are only eight berths to share among us. The idea is that there will be alternating watches of three hours off, six hours on. To call them berths is an exaggeration; they are more like narrow hammocks placed one on top of the other. As for the cooking, there’s a solitary gimbaled burner.

  Ellison informs me that other maxi yachts have owner’s staterooms that provide their skippers with a bit of comfort and privacy. “Nobody told me about owner’s staterooms when we were building Sayonara. Then I found out that Hasso had one on Morning Glory, and I said, ‘I’d like to have one of those.’ But it was too late.” He’s actually quite proud of the fact that he doesn’t get any special treatment on Sayonara, and maybe it’s one of the things he enjoys about the whole experience. Although he owns the boat, he says he regards himself as a junior crew member in terms of status and ability. And while that’s not quite the way the others treat him, it’s also true that there’s no standing on ceremony. Being one of the guys at Oracle ceased to be an option nearly twenty years ago, but it’s not something that worries him greatly. He does seem more relaxed in this environment, perhaps because the burden of performance is much more shared with others.