Fill a teakettle with 2 cups desalinated seawater and bring to a boil. Pour water into a pouch of freeze-dried Beef Teriyaki. Let sit for eight minutes and then serve in a stainless steel bowl that looks like a dog dish. Sound delicious? Welcome to a typical dinner aboard any one of the yachts in the 2005-2006 Volvo Ocean Race.
Known among sailors as the “Everest of Sailing,” the Volvo Race takes place every four years. The race spans some eight months, and covers 31,250 nautical miles. The boats are the most advanced sailing vessels in the world: 70 feet long, with a crew of 10, and capable of achieving speeds of up to 40 knots. Sailing through some of the globe’s most treacherous seas, the racing teams face storms, gales, icebergs, and giant squid, as well as flotsam and jetsam, such as floating containers that have been dislodged from ships in rough weather (about 10,000 of these are lost at sea every year).
“A Volvo yacht is a very harsh environment,” says Kerry Spackman, a neuroscientist who studies the effects of physical stress on racecar drivers and long-distance sailors. “Falling off a 10-foot wave is very uncomfortable,” he explains. “The brain doesn’t know how to cope and it’s horrible, really horrible.” Spackman compares slamming down giant waves to jumping repeatedly off an office desk, but doing it “with your eyes closed and not knowing where the floor is.” Muscles, cartilage and connective tissue can be readily damaged, he says, adding that the human body is designed to absorb shock vertically, but at sea it comes from three dimensions.
In the Volvo races, according to Spackman, the key word is endurance: toughing it out against unforgiving seas and strong-minded rivals. The teams race day and night, for more than 20 days at a time on some of the legs. The intense physical pressure the crews are under means they have to double their daily consumption of water and calories. While the daily caloric intake of an average adult male on land is about 2,500 calories, the Volvo racers must pack in around 5,000 calories every day, more when conditions are especially grueling. To put this in perspective, here’s what a person would have to eat in order to take in 5,000 calories: four bowls of cornflakes, two chicken sandwiches, one chicken fajita wrap, one baked potato, two eggs, three apples, two average servings of salad, three strawberry yogurts, a handful of almonds, a portion of chicken korma and nan bread, one serving of beef in black bean sauce with fried rice, and two bananas.
The predecessor to the Volvo Races was the Whitbread Round the World Race, which began in 1973, with 17 boats setting sail from England to circle the globe. In the earliest days of racing, the crews ate comparatively well. Many yachts sailed with a chef aboard, and sometimes a wine cellar. Today, several boats have a private chef — but only when they are in port. One of the best of the breed is Harry Lynsky, chef for Movistar, the Spanish boat that has already broken the world speed record, achieving a staggering 530.19 nautical miles in 24 hours and averaging 22.09 knots of boat speed.
Lynsky, armed with groceries and his collection of recipes, catches up with Movistar’s crew at every port in the race, beginning on the Galician coast of Spain, then moving on to Cape Town, Melbourne, Wellington, Rio de Janeiro, the three United States’ ports (Baltimore, Annapolis and New York), Portsmouth, Rotterdam and finally, Goteborg, Sweden.
How do the crewmembers feel about Lynsky’s cooking? “He’s a fantastic chef, absolutely fantastic!” enthused Movistar’s skipper Bouwe Bekking. Bekking knows what he’s talking about, for after 20 years experience in the Whitbread and Volvo races — more than any other sailor in this year’s race — he’s had plenty of meals to compare with Lynsky’s.
I asked Harry Lynsky which of his dishes the crew likes best. He thought about it for a moment. “You can’t give them food that’s too rich — steaks, ice cream and such — or their guts rebel,” he answered. “So something like fresh tuna with soy and chutney is a favorite. They all seem to like that.”
Back at sea, the waters surrounding the boats may be teeming with tuna, but for the hungry sailors it’s a steady diet of freeze-dried food. Gone forever is the era of gourmet cuisine on racing yachts. Today, since everything is about speed, the most important thing is to keep the boats as light as possible. No fresh food of any kind is taken on board, no wine, no beer, no bagels, no apples, no cheese, and certainly no steaks. A few crewmembers brought mini bottles of Tabasco Sauce aboard in the hopes of spicing up the generally monotonous fare, but even these few additional ounces were ultimately banned in the interests of shaving off excess weight.
Each of the Volvo boats has its own food program, but the basic menu is similar on all of them: freeze-dried fare, power bars and shakes, beef jerky. Everything is basic, lightweight, calorie-packed, and easy-to-prepare, but menu diversity is not part of the picture. “The guys eat pretty much the same thing day in and day out for nine months,” says Sam Brovender, a physiotherapist who monitored the overall health of Movistar’s team. A pioneer in the field of sailing fitness, he has not only developed a sports program for yacht racers to follow, but he also oversees their nutritional health, bolstering their diets with additional vitamin and mineral supplements (Brovender also uses his skills as a trained acupuncturist to help combat seasickness).
Not surprisingly, food is something the men on the boats think about constantly, and it is a recurrent topic in their e-mails. “The freeze-dried food is on its third or fourth go-round to the point that you know the chicken stew is followed by the beef curry, followed by the roast lamb and potatoes,” lamented Mark Christensen, watch captain on ABN AMRO ONE, in an e-mail. “Somehow a banana power bar doesn’t have the same appeal, and there is only so much beef jerky you can eat in a day.” Campbell Field, navigator for Sunergy and Friends, wrote: “Every day is Wednesday out here. … We’ve gone out of sync with our food bags so we can’t even use our meals as a reference point for some kind of local calendar: Chicken day, Beef day, Bolognaise day, Noodles day, Shepard’s pie day, Carbonara day, etc.”
All on board share galley duty, but sophisticated culinary skills are not an essential part of the job description. On some boats, boiling water is poured directly into the pouches of freeze-dried food, while on others cooking techniques may be slightly more sophisticated. ABN AMRO ONE skipper Mike Sanderson wrote in an e-mail during the leg from Spain to Cape Town: “Life still has its hateful jobs. Galley duty involves hot washing all the four plates, spoons and mugs, and cleaning out The Pot … it is quite simply a matter of putting two pre-prepared bags into the now clean pot, boiling two kettles of fresh (desalinated) water and pouring them onto this dried powder, and stirring for a while. Then the most important part comes. You put the lid on, tap it three times and say, ‘I want this to be beef stroganoff’ (or whatever it said on the packet). This part is really important, for if you don’t prepare your mind for what it is supposed to be then it would have absolutely no idea. I wish you could have seen Gordon Ramsey, the famous chef, spit our glorious food out when he got to sample it a few weeks ago. … We are really starting to look forward to some good Cape Town hospitality. The novelty of wishing on your meal is starting to wear off, even though the sailing never will.”
As they headed out from New York, bound for England, Volvo crewmembers began dreaming of the end of the race, and of the Swedish hospitality that would soon be bestowed on them. After sailing 31,000 miles through five continents and four oceans, they would arrive in Goteborg, Sweden’s largest port. The gastronomic options seemed dazzling. Perhaps some of the men would go for open-faced prawn sandwiches at Junggrens, a traditional cafe that has been a local favorite since the 1890s. Others might head to the stylish Michelin-starred Fond restaurant for, say, a serving of reindeer veal brushed with juniper-smoked oil. After subsisting on freeze-dried food, eaten with a spoon from a metal bowl, Olympic sailor and Movistar crewmember Fernando Echavarri probably summed up everyone’s wishes when he mused, “What I’m looking forward to is something like an entrecote. At any rate, something you can cut with a knife.”
And then, on a Saturday night, disaster struck Movistar. The boat was sailing 300 miles off Land’s End on England’s southwestern coast, in horrendous weather with high seas and winds peaking at 50 knots. “Suddenly there was an enormous cracking sound like a piece of wood snapping,” recalls Bouwe Bekking describing the noise the keel made as it broke. Soon the yacht was taking in water at the ruptured joint. After assessing the situation, Bekking came to a painful conclusion. “The hardest decision I’ve ever taken in my life was the call to abandon ship,” he says.
On Sunday, ABM AMRO TWO received the distress call that a rival boat was in danger of sinking. The decision to launch a rescue action was particularly wrenching as only two days earlier one of their own sailors, Han Hoorevoets, had been washed overboard and drowned. In heavy seas they raced toward Movistar and positioned themselves for the rescue operation. Miraculously, all 10 crewmembers were safely transferred by life raft.
“It could have been a disaster,” says ABM AMRO TWO’s Nick Bice. “Once Bouwe made his decision, we got them off. I haven’t ever seen 10 happier guys step onto a Volvo 70.”
Movistar, which cost several million dollars to build, was abandoned at sea. Recovery efforts to find her have so far been unsuccessful. As for her crew, four of them will be racing in the Sardinia Rolex Cup, leaving from the sunny Mediterranean island’s Porto Cervo. It will be a distinct change of scene for them — but their diet will most likely be more of the same.
USEFUL NUMBERS:
— Fond Restaurant, Gotaplatsen, 031 81 25 80
— Junggrens Cafe, Kungsportsavenyn 37, Goteborg, Tel. 031 16 1751.
