Not so much a boat as a business

• NEWS
• 18 Dec, 2010 08:55:00 AM

Not so much a boat as a business

Remember the time when you and your mates went down to the club, hoisted the sails and went racing.

Remember the time when you and your mates went down to the club, hoisted the sails and went racing. 

Lots still do it that way, but in the world of grand prix racing boats, fully professional crews and multi-million dollar global campaigns a yachting program has come to resemble a highly organised, highly efficient business.

Just like Formula One motor racing, where the car is the end product of a diverse team of drivers, engineers, accountants and managers, a modern ocean racing yacht crossing the start line is the result of a huge process of planning, logistics and management.  And at the centre of all this is a new type of profession, the boat captain, sometimes known as the boat manager.

Take Niklas Zennstrom’s 72-foot Rán, one of the big favorites to win the Rolex Sydney Hobart 2010.  She was here last year after her win in the 2009 Rolex Fastnet, turning in an impeccable performance to finish sixth in a race that turned out to suit the smaller, slower 40 footers that scooted home on a fresh breeze after the big boats were already tied up in Hobart.

Since then she has been racing in the Mediterranean, before returning to Sydney.

Making all this happen is Wade “Bubs” Morgan, Rán’s boat captain.

“My job is to get her to the start line on time in full race condition,” he says.

“It starts at the beginning of the year with dinner with the owners and the Rán yachting project manager, who oversees the whole racing and building program of several boats).  What do we want to do with the boat this year?  Will we take her to the Caribbean, Newport Rhode Island, Sardinia, Sydney?  What the budget is.”

Once that is decided, Morgan gets to work.

“To get Rán here we put her on a ship on October 22nd.  It takes five to six weeks for the ship to get here, and we had another week’s delay because of port operations.

“Then we had to get the boat out of the ship, get it fixed up, change a few things with the keel and unpack the mast.  You can imagine how easily things can blow out but you’ve got that December 26 deadline.”

Wherever she goes Rán travels with two 40-foot containers and a third 20-foot container. 

“We have a lathe, a scissor lift, our own scaffolding. We are completely self-sufficient.  I have three full-time people working for me on the boat – a rigger, boat builder and an all-round guy who can do just about anything.

“We can fix a hole in the hull or replace a broken bowsprit in 24 hours.  We have a spare bowsprit in the container.”

Come race time the four become 24, as professional sailors from the UK, America, New Zealand and Australia fly in to make up Rán’s 20 strong racing crew as well as a chef. 

“You can’t just turn up at a restaurant with 24 people on Christmas day,” Morgan quips.

“It’s very important for the owners to enjoy sailing with the people they’re with.  So a guy might have a gold medal but if he is not going to gel with the owners you don’t want him.”

Morgan sort of drifted into a career that barely existed when he left school to start a boat building apprenticeship. 

“In 1999 Syd Fischer included me in his Young Australia America’s Cup campaign.   It was an amazing experience.  You accumulate so much big boat experience so quickly and in 2000 I got involved with Neville Chrichton’s Alfa Romeo program.”

He was with Alfa Romeo last year, when Grant Wharington’s 98-foot super maxi Skandia broke her mast just weeks before the Boxing Day. The frantic rush to get a replacement is the quintessential example of what a boat captain has to be able to do if something really bad happens.

“We had a spare mast in a shed in France. Skandia’s boat captain’s job was to get it to Sydney, stepped and working by race day. The mast was too long to fit into a plane, so it had to be cut. So you talk to the mast designers about how to cut it, organise to get the mast from storage in France to somewhere where it can be cut to the designers’ instructions and find a plane to bring it from France.  The mast designers in New Zealand also had to make a sleeve so that the mast could be put back together.  That had to be sent from New Zealand to Sydney.”

On top of that, sails had to be recut to fit the new mast.

“They did a great job to make the start, but in reality they needed a couple of extra days for a race as demanding as the Hobart. But they did compete in the Coffs race a couple of days later.”

The modern boat captain is involved from the very first moments of a new boat project. 

“You sit down with the owner and try to figure what he wants to do.  What races does he want to compete in?  If it’s a grand prix boat like Rán you do a weather study on these races to decide what conditions she will sail in so that she can be designed and built very specifically for them.  It can take a few months to nail the design down.

“A 70 footer like Rán will take eight to 12 months to build.  You can build it faster, but it costs more when all those overtime bills come in.

“So 12 months is a realistic time from when you first know what you want and getting to the start line.” 

In just over a decade Wade Morgan has gone from apprentice boat builder to being responsible for a million dollar boat campaign, satisfying corporate titans who expect results from the fortune they put into their sailing.  It is something he just could never have imagined back then. 

By Jim Gale/Rolex Sydney Hobart media team