Volvo Ocean Race- A great national adventure - NCB Ireland

by David Brannigan on 24 Aug 2010 From the Volvo Ocean Race legends series:

In 1989, Joe English steered the Irish 82-foot maxi NCB Ireland campaign to the start line in Southampton, carrying the hopes and aspirations of homeland in a time of considerable upheaval.

In the early hours of a cold October morning in 1988, a large section of a big warehouse wall in the Ballyfermot industrial district of Dublin was smashed to create a gaping hole. Bright lights inside revealed a gleaming white hull, the like of which had never before been seen in Ireland.

Deep in the night, the 82-foot maxi yacht was hauled from its birthplace, loaded onto a special flatbed trailer and taken 10 miles to the docklands on the river Liffey where, within one month, she was rigged, tested and named NCB Ireland.

It was the start of a great national adventure as a first and only Irish entry in the Whitbread 1989-90. The planning stage of talk and hope had ended; here at last, was proof that a dream was coming true.

Less than one year later, the Irish yacht pounded through the choppy waters of the Solent as one of a 23-strong starting fleet in the race, facing the 31,500 nautical miles of the world's most famous ocean race.

Skipper Joe English carried not just the responsibility of leading his crew, but the hopes of a small nation ravaged by high unemployment, mass-emigration and economic stagnation.

Sporting the logos of National and City Brokers, Jameson Irish Whiskey, Aer Lingus, ESB International and Irish Life Assurance, here was the best of Ireland, and carrying the hopes and aspirations of 3.5 million people to the world. If a prize for ambition could have been awarded, here was a prime contender.

With the race underway, leading the fleet westwards towards the Needles, another small island national entry was giving notice of a hard lesson for the remainder of the fleet as Peter Blake on Steinlager 2 surged ahead in what was to become a slam-dunk result for a great Kiwi sailing legend in the making.

The reality for English and his crew was that the true achievement had been to reach the starting line, while the test that followed, that of completing the course intact, represented the great unsung reward of the race.

Coming from a career of sail-making that started in 1976 at the North Sails loft in Kinsale, Co. Cork, Joe English's appointment as NCB Ireland's skipper only occurred two months before the start of the race, just before the birth of his daughter Aoife. It was a time of considerable upheaval as he danced between the competing politics of a national campaign, managing a maxi yacht crew and the expectations of what was then Ireland's biggest ever sponsorship project.

Watch-leader Gordon MaguireM from Dublin was recruited just weeks before the start of the race, but switched allegiance to British entry Rothmans after leg one, when skipper Lawrie Smith offered him an opportunity to continue their successful relationship formed earlier that summer with victory in the Admiral's Cup.

Although organised by a voluntary committee comprising more than a dozen of the country's best known business figures, with the attendant drawbacks of such a structure, English was still allowed to get on with his primary role of leading his team at sea, while others handled the campaign management.

The maxi yachts of that era sailed with double the crew of today's Volvo yachts and the bigger boats were luxurious by comparison.

'When you're a racing skipper, you must be flexible and use the people you have for their strengths,' said English. 'With a large crew, such as on a maxi, you're covered for most needs.' This enabled a high-degree of self-sufficiency at sea, which was especially vital when NCB Ireland suffered a series of gear, especially boom, failures, that dogged their performance.

The problems at sea inevitably led to negative publicity at home, though much of it was at variance with the popularity enjoyed by the team amongst the fleet and public in the stopover ports around the world.

'We didn't pay too much regard to the negative publicity,' English recalled. 'We just got on with racing and if anyone on the team mentioned it, they'd be told to forget about it and get on with the job.

Nevertheless, English admits that one of the early failings of the campaign was that expectations were set too high and that everyone at home thought they were going to win. This meant the actual successes of the project were over-shadowed.

It was also a time of massive change in the world, something that the crews were all too aware of over the 10-month race as they challenged the world's oceans.

'We all knew there was upheaval in the world, and we were hungry for any information we could glean,' the Irish skipper remembers. 'But when we heard about the Berlin Wall coming down, we knew there was something pretty huge taking place.'

Two decades later, the memories of that epic race are still vivid for English. Being becalmed at Cape Horn, robbing the crew of their wild ride past the infamous landmark, only to have the stuffing knocked out of them just a few miles later during a gale in the Strait de Maire, was a highlight of sorts.

'It was a combination of the weather and the wildlife, of witnessing the Great Albatross up close that makes this a unique experience.' In common with many crew of any race, it is the special co-existence of man and nature in the Southern Ocean that is this skipper's abiding memory.

Such intense experiences are of particularly poignant value to him as in more recent years, Joe has become one of the youngest victims of Alzheimer's Disease and faces a battle of an altogether different kind on a daily basis.

Where is NCB Ireland now - will she be in Alicante for the Legends Regatta next year? If she is, Joe English is determined that he will be there also for another turn at the helm.

Adapted from an original article featured in Life at the Extreme, the official magazine of the Volvo Ocean Race.

Email us at legends@volvooceanrace.com if you know what happened to NCB Ireland and where she is now.