The Publisher
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Dec 20, 2011, 2:39 PM
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Re: [The Publisher] SPANISH CASTLE TO WHITE NIGHT
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Spanish Castle to White Night is Mark Chisnell’s account of the Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09. This short extract introduces one of the race’s great characters - Jerry Kirby. Interestingly, it is Jerry's son Rome that is among the crew on PUMA in the 2011-12 edition of the race.
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Amongst PUMA’s crew for Leg 5 was the American Jerry Kirby, famous for being, at 52, the world’s oldest bowman. It was a title he had held for some time, despite the fact that it’s widely regarded as a young man’s game up at the pointed end. After sailing Leg 1 to Cape Town, Kirby had gone home to deal with the impact the credit crunch was having on his construction business. To say that the process was ongoing would be an understatement, but not even financial apocalypse, defaulting clients and troublesome employees were going to stop Jerry Kirby from doing Leg 5. Afterwards he said, “It was really stupid to do this leg, as a businessman.”
Kirby is the eternal optimist, famous for his perpetual cheer and a wealth of stories. He had come up through the sport the old way, the hard way. Born in the original home of the America’s Cup, Newport, Rhode Island, he had watched his first Cup from his grandfather’s tugboat at the age of two. At 14, Kirby was hanging around outside the Intrepid America’s Cup camp, begging for work. They showed him the rigging container and told him to clean it out while they went sailing. By the time Intrepid returned to the dock, the container had been emptied, swept, painted, sorted and restacked. Kirby had his foot in the door, and three weeks later he was sailing. It was the summer of 1970, the year the Beatles broke up, the year Jimi Hendrix died.
Despite all that experience, Kirby knew exactly where he stood in the decision-making process: “The eight sled dogs are on deck, blinders on, pulling the sled... So what, you’re going to go and argue with them [skipper and navigator]? Forget it, whatever they come up with, we go that way, you don’t even think twice...”
Kirby’s sled-dog metaphor was bleak, if apt. They were on deck for four hours, burning every calorie they could eat and crawling into the bunk at the end of it, with little mental stimulus and virtually no knowledge of the outside world. But sceptical bells rang over something that Kirby had said earlier in Cape Town - was the atmosphere really so intense on deck that there was little or no conversation even from Jerry Kirby? It was no surprise when PUMA’s media crewman, Rick Deppe, blew this image apart after Kirby returned for Leg 5 (the 12,300 nm route from Qingdao in China to Rio de Janeiro), writing from the boat:
“I think that in one 15 minute period there he [Kirby] took the banter from a discussion about whether or not to shake a reef out, to an extended history lesson on the carriage houses of New England and the relative merits of red cedar over slate as a roofing material, then on to a self-diagnosis of his ribs, which he thinks might be broken, and finally for this 15 minute window of time a great story about dirt biking on the Baja peninsula with a retired line-backer who owns a bar in Tijuana.”
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To relive the last edition of the race, ‘Spanish Castle to White Night’ is now available in an eBook - available at all good eBook retailers, and for the Kindle at Amazon.com: http://tinyurl.com/kindle-072811
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