Three of the most remarkable recent sailing achievements have come at the hands of Americans. In October 2001 Steve Fossett, Stan Honey, and the rest of the
PlayStation crew shattered the west-to-east non-racing transatlantic speed record when the big catamaran took four days, 17 hours to get from New York to Lizard Head, England, averaging almost 26 knots. In September 2003, Kenny Read won the Etchells Class World Championship over 93 other teams with six firsts and a second.
And then we have the achievement of Brad Van Liew. The 35-year-old Southern Californian easily won the Open 50 division in the 2002-03 Around Alone singlehanded race by 1,000 miles, along the way setting a 50-foot monohull 24-hour record of 345 miles.
Interested in his motivations and thoughts, I caught up with Van Liew twice, first in New Zealand in January 2003 during a break in the Around Alone race, and then in October, after his finish, while he was doing a publicity tour of boat shows.
For people predisposed to think of singlehanded sailors as small, wiry, and anti-social, Brad Van Liew will come as a surprise. He’s a big, friendly fellow with a fullback’s build and a fullback’s focus on finding the hole in the
line ahead of him. Here is a pragmatic problem-solver, not an escapist visionary. When he speaks of the vocation that he has chosen for himself
—racing sailboats, weather, and exhaustion for weeks at a time in absolute solitude
—he does not go into rhapsodic soliloquies. Joshua Slocum, that philosopher of aloneness, was fond of making declarations like “surely I sailed alone with God.”
More recently,
Ellen MacArthur has told us in her autobiography,
Taking on the World, that toward the end of a tough solo race, she wrote the following in her log: “I now feel so wonderfully in tune with the boat and the sea that I know I shall really miss this once the race is over.”
To say that it is hard to imagine Van Liew offering such reflections is by no means a criticism of him. He has feelings. Describing singlehanded racing as “a test of passion,” he says, “You don’t do this for money. You do this from the heart. You have to want to do this so bad that you’re prepared to suffer. I can sleep three hours in three days.” But the reason for doing it is not to enjoy one’s own company. Solitude, he believes, is the natural condition of being successful, for as he says, “If you want to challenge yourself—you’ll be alone.” The trick is to keep the goal clear. “You must have a defined objective. It’s one step at a time.” And he adds, humbly: “The hardest thing is to get started.”
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| "You don’t do this for money. You do this from the heart." |
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When Van Liew’s self-discipline and focus soften, it is where you might not expect: he loves his competitors. In every other sport
—including typical sailboat racing
—the other guy is considered the enemy (at least for the time being). Not so in solo racing. “We as competitors are each other’s own life support system,” he told me in October. “It’s like going to war
against someone and ditto
with someone
—and it’s the same person. You become so intensely tight. It’s really a special bond.” After he lost his
rig during his first Around Alone, his competitors chipped in to help him replace it. This time around, when he replaced his rigging he donated his old gear to a competitor in his class.
This appealing blue-collar singlehander looked worn out in Auckland at the press event organized by his sponsor. Exhaustion is constant around and in the massive dinghies that are today’s singlehanded racers. Sometimes called “monomarans” because they can often keep up with multihulls on a long reach, these are whopping big, complicated, temperamental boats. Simply jibing them takes 40 minutes, what with all the shifting of sails, redistributing of water ballast, and the canting of the keel so the boat doesn’t capsize on the other tack. So one of the singlehander’s most intractable problems, as Van Liew said, is “sleep management,” which is a euphemism for getting by on almost no sleep at all. When I saw him in Auckland, he was about to head out into the wild, iceberg-strewn Southern Ocean on the route to Cape Horn. Already he and his competitors had endured sleeplessness days and nights in rough weather while crossing the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. While sailing south along the Spanish coast, they had been hit by a gale so great that the fleet holed up in Bayona for four days.
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Still, when Van Liew talks about the demands of these races, he lingers less over rough weather than the business demands of satisfying his sponsor and managing his boat and his large support team. He knew these demands full well long before he started the 2002-03 Around Alone because he had sailed in the previous race. Deciding to stick with it, he acquired one of the boats that beat him and signed up with a sponsor, Tommy Hilfinger.
That is where a singlehanded race begins—with the race for a sponsor. “There’s no question that the recipe for success starts with finding money,” Van Lieu told me in October. “That makes things happen. If you want to win, you need money, you need experience, you need a good boat, good equipment, good shore support, and you need a good sponsor. The key is a good sponsor. It’s a catch 22.”
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| "A different type of personality has emerged at the top of solo racing." |
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When I asked him what he meant by “experience,” he quickly ran through a list. First there was talent. Second, “The ability to tolerate the pain
—the sleep deprivation.” Third came hours under sail; fourth, technical knowledge. “The first time, I was a wide-eyed novice running on adrenaline who wasn’t expected to win. You work your way through by Braille, feeling your way through it. The first time it was more fun, being fresh and new to the race and the boat. But this time it was more rewarding. The difficulty is you’re expected to do well.”
Add to those interior pressures the expectations of the sponsor and a schedule of perpetual public relations. These, says Van Liew, are the heaviest demands on a sailor today, which is why a different type of personality has emerged at the top of solo racing. Where singlehanders used to get away with being shy—in fact, that was part of their appeal—now the business favors gregarious people. Extroverts are better able to make the pitch to and close the deal with a sponsor (“You have to be able to walk into a room and they’ll want to back you”), and they are prepared psychologically to maintain the relationship through relentless public exposure. efore satellite phones and e-mail came on board, solo sailors could look forward to a getaway once the dock lines were cast off. Now they are in the public relations business 24/7.
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Some people like this work and do it easily, and Brad Van Liew seems to be one of them. He has mastered a business that leaves little room for sentimentality except to package it for a public with an insatiable appetite for romantic stories of men-against-the-sea. This is not a wholly new phenomenon. Over a century ago, Joshua Slocum packaged himself as a crusty old Yankee sea dog (which he definitely was not) and partially financed his voyage by writing articles and giving slide shows. Just hours after completing his circumnavigation, he was in direct and ambitious communications with an editor about writing a book. What’s different today is that without a sponsor and an elaborate publicity apparatus, a solo racing sailor has little hope of even getting a boat and being noticed.
When I asked Van Lieu if he enjoyed going out for the occasional sail, just for the fun of it, he replied, “Sure—but it’s obviously a job, you know.”
