Volvo Ocean Race - Two friends, one unlikely trek

by Christopher Clarey on 23 May 2015 Volvo Ocean Race - For men born and raised more than 5,000 miles apart, Charlie Enright and Mark Towill share plenty of common ground.

They made a movie together, sailed together at Brown University and chased funding together for a long-shot project.

Now, the two close friends with the thickly calloused hands that come with years of yanking on ropes and hoisting sails are well on their way to racing around the world together.

It has been a grueling shared journey involving four-hour sleeping shifts, a bacchanalian celebration at the Equator and even a rescue mission. Though they still have the Atlantic to cross before finishing their first Volvo Ocean Race, they are already eager to do it all again.

“We’ve learned so much the last nine months, we’re ready to get another crack at it,” Enright, the skipper of Team Alvimedica, said in an interview before sailing out of Newport, R.I., for Lisbon on Sunday.

The odds were heavily against their making this journey at all. The nautical world is awash in young talent. It is not awash in deep-pocketed sponsors prepared to provide the young and the gifted with the $15 million or more necessary to fund a round-the-world Volvo campaign.

To make matters more daunting, Enright, a 30-year-old from Rhode Island, and Towill, 26 and from Hawaii, had little offshore racing experience compared with many of the more weathered competitors they would face.

“In some ways, I think it was harder putting the team together than it’s been doing the race,” Towill said.

While there was once a shortage of buying power, there has never been a shortage of brainpower. Enright has a steel-trap memory, a quick wit and the ability to steer a yacht through heavy traffic during a practice race while cracking a joke or mischievously poking a crew member in the back.

Towill, the more overtly earnest of the two, attended Punahou School, the private school in Oahu that is also President Obama’s alma mater. He was later accepted by Stanford, M.I.T. and Brown, but he chose Brown because he liked its location, its lack of a core curriculum and its strong sailing team.

“A lot of people told me I was crazy, but then a lot of people told us we were crazy to do this, too,” Towill said.

Towill and Enright met in 2007 when they were chosen to be subjects of the documentary Morning Light,” which was filmed largely in Hawaii. The film depicts a crew of young sailors, funded by Roy E. Disney, competing in the 2007 Transpacific Race.

Enright, who is from a sailing family, had once followed the Volvo from afar with his Rhode Island elementary school as part of a class project. And during the making of “Morning Light,” he and Towill met several sailors who had done the Volvo, including the American navigator Stan Honey.

The dream endured, and their first big task was to persuade Knut Frostad, the former Norwegian round-the-world racer who is the chief executive of the Volvo.

“We had a lot of options of young people we could have gone with, and I think the main reason was simply that I felt Mark and Charlie understood what it took,” Frostad said.

He added: “When Mark called me the first time, I said: ‘Don’t ask me anything. Just show up, and I’ll talk to you when I see you show up.’ ”

Showing up meant flying across the Atlantic to the race headquarters in Alicante, Spain, in 2011.

“They told me they would do anything it took to make it happen, spend all their time and sacrifice anything they could sacrifice,” Frostad said. “That’s what it requires. It is truly much harder to get to the starting line than to get around the world.”

That is not to underestimate the challenges of the sailing: spartan conditions, physical exhaustion and living on board at an often-extreme angle in a class of yachts that are sturdy but heel very easily.

“The part that surprised me most is the mental part of it,” Towill said. “You can go out and do an hourlong race and be very focused. We’re all very used to sailing inshore. But having to be on for 24 hours a day for 27 days in a row is a whole different skill set.”

Enright, soon to be a father for the first time, has found himself in his bunk thinking of the future and wondering if he was losing an edge to more single-minded competitors.

“I wonder if maybe I should be thinking about what’s the next sail, the next shift, all this stuff,” he said. “Which is crazy, but it’s the life we’ve chosen for now.”

They want a top-three finish. But the Volvo, even in an age when thrill-seeking has become increasingly banal, remains part adventure, part race. Finishing is still an accomplishment in itself, and with six of the nine legs completed, Alvimedica is in fourth place among the seven yachts that started in Alicante in October.

The high-water mark so far for the young Americans and their crew was rounding Cape Horn in first place on a clear day during the fifth leg through the Southern Ocean from Auckland, New Zealand, to Itajaí, Brazil.

“Cape Horn is the Everest everyone says it is,” Enright said. “It’s a rugged part of the world that most people that round it aren’t always privileged to see.”

The low point? Team Vestas Wind running aground on a reef during leg two in a remote, shark-infested stretch of the Indian Ocean, which required Alvimedica to change course.

“That night, it turned from a race into a rescue mission,” Enright said Wednesday in a talk he gave to members of the New York Yacht Club in Newport. “Everybody talks about how noble it was for us to stop racing and come to their aid, but really it wasn’t a decision at all. It’s just what you do, and we were about three hours away from them when they ran aground.

“You guys all know that everybody made it out O.K., but at the time, there was no saying that was going to be the case.”

Alvimedica eventually established communication with the crew, which was picked up by the local authorities and whose badly damaged boat was recovered. The boat is being repaired in Italy in the hope that the team will be able to rejoin the race in Lisbon for the final two short-haul legs in Europe.

Enright and Towill, the American rookies, have managed to keep their 65-foot yacht in one piece, even if they could do no better than fifth on the leg into Newport, which Enright, who lives in nearby Bristol, considers a home port.

“Obviously they had a bad leg, which happens to everyone in the end,” said Ian Walker, the British skipper of the race leader, Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing. “If we’d done this interview a month ago, you’d just have been talking about their rate of improvement and progression. Obviously now they’ve got a bit of work to do.”

Enright and Towill concur, and they have no intention of slowing their work rate, even when their circumnavigation ends and with fatherhood looming for Enright, whose wife, Meris, is expecting their first child in August.

“You are going to think we’re crazy,” Towill said.

When they finish the Volvo in late June in Goteborg, Sweden, they plan to fly back almost immediately to the United States and take part in the Transatlantic Race from Newport to England. They then intend to fly back to California and take part in the Transpacific Race to Honolulu.

“And then be a dad,” Enright said.