Worth His Salt

With a big lead and the North Atlantic standing between EF Language and overall victory in the Whitbread Round the World sailing race, skipper Paul Cayard had a decision to make: Sail a safe southerly route or take the shortest course, north into the ice fields that claimed the Titanic 86 years ago.

“The cost in terms of time to avoid the ice is six hours,” he said via e-mail from his boat last weekend. “Too much in racing terms. I discussed the risks with the crew, and, to a man, they are all for going in. The boys came to race.”

Damn the icebergs! Go ahead! Full speed!

When Cayard said he was taking a huge risk by sailing the race in the first place, he wasn’t thinking about icebergs, mammoth seas, gale-force winds or sailing off the end of the earth.

Over the last eight months, he has faced all that. What concerned him more was how his performance would affect the selling of his America’s Cup program to potential sponsors.

“If I was doing the Dennis Conner program right now, it wouldn’t look good,” Cayard said.

Cayard’s AmericaOne campaign for San Francisco’s St. Francis Yacht Club was already struggling for funds when he agreed to sail the Whitbread for EF Education, a Swedish company that teaches foreign languages to students living abroad.

As the nine Whitbread 60s sail the next-to-last leg to La Rochelle, France, Conner’s Toshiba is contesting first place with Monaco’s Merit Cup but is seventh overall after a series of misadventures. Cayard’s EF Language, with previous finishes of first, fifth, first, fourth, first, second and third, is in fourth place in the leg but has a large enough lead in points to clinch overall victory by week’s end if it stays ahead of runner-up Swedish Match, currently fifth in the leg.

So Cayard’s risk paid off.

“The upside has been huge,” Cayard said.

No doubt, EF Language’s success influenced Hewlett-Packard to bankroll Cayard’s America’s Cup campaign, an alliance announced last month when none of the five other U.S. teams could claim a major sponsor.

But the Swedes also were taking a chance on Cayard, 38, a suntanned Californian who had won a Star class world title and sailed boats into the final rounds of the last two America’s Cup events but had achieved little notoriety beyond sight of land.

They had hired Britain’s Lawrie Smith, a Whitbread veteran, to sail the boat. But when a British tobacco company surfaced with an entry, Smith asked to jump ship. The Swedes went back to Cayard, who had been on their original short list.

“It was a big risk,” said Magnus Olsson, who helped put together the well-funded program. “I had never sailed with Paul, [and] he had never sailed the Whitbread.”

Cayard rounded up a few close San Francisco friends, such as Kimo Worthington, Steve Erickson and a critical choice, navigator Mark Rudiger.

Five months earlier, Worthington had been working for America’s Challenge of Newport Beach, a Whitbread team that folded after Leg 1. Worthington might have seen that coming, for he left America’s Challenge long before the race began.

“Paul [had] laughed at me,” Worthington said. “ ‘What the hell are you thinking? You’re crazy [to do the Whitbread].’ So when he asked, ‘Are you interested?’ I said, ‘Sure!’ ”

Olsson and Klas Nylof remained aboard, but they are the only Swedes among the 12-man crew. Six are Americans, the largest U.S. representation on any boat, including Baltimore’s Chessie and Conner’s Toshiba, which has no Yanks unless Conner happens to be aboard.

But none of Cayard’s Americans had ever sailed a Whitbread, either. With only four U.S. boats and 61 Americans having participated in the six previous races, it hasn’t been an American thing to do.

Jerry Kirby of Newport, R.I., who is sailing on Chessie, said, “There’s always been a myth that Americans weren’t good offshore sailors.”

Curt Oetking, a 41-year-old Texan on Cayard’s boat, said, “It’s funny, because while Toshiba is an American entry, when [former skipper] Chris Dickson was putting together the crew, he basically stated that Americans weren’t tough enough to sail offshore. Lawrie Smith was saying we were too old.”

The U.S. hadn’t been doing well inshore, either. In 1995, it lost the America’s Cup to New Zealand, a country the size of California with a population of 3.5 million, and in ’96 had managed to win only two medals--both bronze--at the Olympics on its home waters.

With all that, it was no surprise that the official line at Southampton last September had EF Language back in the pack at 8-1, the same odds Real Quiet carried in the Kentucky Derby.

Cayard had ‘em right where he wanted ‘em.

“The fact we’d never done it, that we’d be underdogs, that’s right up my alley,” he said. “If you want to bet that I can’t do something, you’ll really get me motivated.”

After winning two of the first three legs, Cayard and his crew became prohibitive favorites-- although, in fact, they still didn’t know how to sail the race. For Americans, the Transpac’s 2,225 nautical miles to Hawaii is a long race. Six of the Whitbread’s nine legs are longer, and several are rougher, colder and much more dangerous.

After winning Leg 1 on Rudiger’s navigational wizardry, EF Language dived into the Southern Ocean--what sailors call “the real Whitbread”--with a new but naive confidence and got hammered, finishing fifth in the leg.

Crewman Josh Belsky of Annapolis, Md., said, “We were Southern Ocean virgins. We got down there and made a lot of really stupid mistakes . . . having too much sail area up at times, when we could have been going just as fast with smaller sails up and a lot more under control.”

Some Whitbread veterans on board knew better, but they hadn’t yet won Cayard’s confidence.

New Zealand’s Mark Christensen, who had sailed on Conner’s boat, Winston, in 1993-94, said, “While Paul listens to what you say, he doesn’t always take it on board. There were times when he could have used us more than he did. He wanted to learn by experience, and he did.”

Later, Cayard said of Christensen, “He has by far the best feel for what sail to use at what time.”

And Cayard and his American mates learned. On Leg 5, the next venture into the Southern Ocean, they won by five days.

Cayard said, “Leading the fleet through the roughest part of Leg 5 and around Cape Horn is a huge personal achievement. I have not learned so much in this sport in the last 10 years as I have in the last [few] months.”

The rookie Americans don’t feel like Whitbread virgins anymore, although they admit that sometimes the sailing was scary.

“For sure,” Erickson said. “What scared me on Leg 1 was when it was blowing 32 [knots] in the dark, but that’s like good fun now.”

Veteran rivals such as New Zealand’s Grant Dalton of Merit Cup concede that the level of competition has risen.

“Lack of experience has its downsides,” Cayard said. “But not having preconceived ideas about how to do the race has some upsides. We have a different style and work ethic . . . much more intense.”

Christensen recognized Cayard’s intensity early on.

“If you’re sailing with other boats, Paul thrives on that,” he says. “He won’t go off deck, and he doesn’t sleep if we’re losing. He does all the hard labor. You can’t get a better leader that way. It’s impressive to see that someone cares that much, but if he had to do that all the time it would burn him out.”

Cayard says, “Coming in second gives me a bad taste in my mouth.”

But Cayard has come to love the Whitbread, perhaps even more than the America’s Cup.

“You can’t do something like the Whitbread and not have your perspective on everything change,” he says. “You realize that a lot of what you have is frivolous, extraneous stuff that you don’t really need to get by. Because I worked for [Italy’s] Raul Gardini [in the ’92 America’s Cup], I’ve stayed in the best hotels, I’ve flown around in the private jets and helicopters, I’ve had a Ferrari. I’ve lived an incredibly good life for 38 years old, but it’s good to go back to basics.

“The Whitbread involves a lot of sacrifices. You don’t change your clothes, you don’t eat good food, you sleep in an awful bunk, when you sleep at all. It’s rough and tough.”

And, at times, sublime.

“The sunsets and sunrises are incredible,” Cayard rhapsodized via e-mail one day. “I really like the sunrise. Being at the helm of the boat, powering along at 24 knots, spray flying up as you launch down the big rollers, is such a great feeling. You are really in touch with nature--just us, our fantastic boat, the wind and the sea, for as many miles as you care to think about. This is the most extreme thing I have ever done, and it is the best sailing experience I have ever had.”