Photos: L Oskar Kihlborg R Martin Stockbridge

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Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:00:00 UTC

With plenty of Whitbread/Volvo campaigns under his belt, Dutchman Marcel Van Triest gives an insight into his life onboard, his views on barometers versus grib files, brains versus circuit boards and all that goes with the lonely life as navigator of a grand prix racing yacht.

It’s been 17 long years since Marcel Van Triest was onboard Equity&Law II sailing in his first race around the world. For two years he worked on that project, scarcely earning 6,500 euros in modern money for his troubles, but sailing the race had been a boyhood dream and a privilege. So none of that mattered. Today, five races on, the 42-year old Dutchman is getting significantly more cash as navigator of Brasil 1, yet the job just ain’t what it used to be. For sure he still navigates, and yes that desk he occupies below deck remains the loneliest place in the world. But today, with the years having taken away his hair and allocated him some perspective, it is a different game compared with all those years ago.

In the good old days

Once upon a time, Marcel would have found himself on deck, staring at a barometer and searching the skies for the winds that would give him the bragging rights against his counterparts on the other boats. Today he spends more time below deck. The Gridded Binary (GRIB) weather maps he used to draw from his observations have been replaced by weather files sent via space to one of his onboard laptops.

The GPS he would use for the two hours a day it worked has lost its place to constant satellite tracking, while his home for weeks at a time is made from carbon fibre not aluminium. The event he first entered as a last-minute substitute for a friend has changed beyond recognition. “There was a lot of Corinthian effort back at the start. It was all more simple. Simple tools, simple materials, amateur crews. Now every one of those things has got better and the sport is very corporate,” he says. “It is also much more technological now.” Then he sighs. “It has made for better sailing, yes. The boats go very fast, but it is easier for navigators.” Easier meaning better? Better meaning more fun? “No, not really.” Cue a bigger sigh. The appeal of this sport to Marcel has always been the chess game played out between the different navigators, the pitting of your unique wits against someone else’s.

Changing tactics

He admits he is not one of the “adrenaline junkies” and while at home he prefers to spend time studying the economy, a subject in which he trained at Rotterdam University, and monitoring the weather. “I love the tactical side. No one onboard has the specialist knowledge the navigator’s have,” he explains. But now, with technology breaking down boundaries insurmountable to the human mind, it has, well, taken much of the decision making away from the brain and put it into a circuit board. “The overall sailing experience has improved dramatically,” Marcel accepts. “But for me as a navigator having all those fantastic forecasts onboard is now a little bit boring because everyone has the same information and says ‘oh, let’s go left.’ In the old days I was drawing up my own weather maps and looking outside, looking at the barometer and think ‘this is going on’. It was more of an art really. “But then you can’t go back to it. You can’t stop progress.”

Yet the fundamentals of his job remain the same. He still must search for the most suitable weather systems, albeit largely from a computer database as opposed to the skies. His calls still receive huge amounts of public scrutiny and the navigator is still a forlorn figure on a claustrophobic boat. He even operates his own watch system, while the others at least enjoy a semblance of routine. “It is a very lonely job,” Marcel explains. “I think any navigator in the fleet will concur with that. There are not that many navigators in the world and we tend to be very specialised in what we do and it’s very rare for someone else on the boat to have the same knowledge. You get very lonely that way. “I think it’s why you see good contact sometimes between the navigators of the different boats because they are on the same wavelength. If some other navigator tells me, ‘nice move’ that means much more than some crewmember telling me.” And it is the small pieces of gratification like that which help spur him on at sea and in life. You sense from speaking to Marcel he is a man constantly assessing his self-worth. He enjoys the Southern Ocean because it makes him feel humble, while he rarely relaxes because his job demands the right call every time. Even while the rest of the crews enjoy time off at the stopovers Marcel, and the other perfection-seeking navigators, keep an eye constantly aimed at the weather.

Isolation

“I like the Southern Ocean. I just enjoy the desolation of the place. It is very hard in our society today to get away from human interference. Even in the north Atlantic you scan the horizon you will see a cargo ship somewhere or overhead you will see some airliner going somewhere. There’s pollution. In the Southern Ocean there is no shipping, no airlines, there’s nothing there. It makes you feel a little bit humble, I think, about your place in life in general. You escape those normal pressures and what people are writing about you on shore. “In this sport, it is the navigator’s decisions that get the criticism. The whole world watches and if you make a mistake it is your mistake. You must always work hard to get it right. The work never really stops, but if you get it right you get the praise too. It is worth the work.” Such intense scrutiny on his professional life, he explains, is one of the reasons why he likes to keep his personal life private. Details of his private life stretch to a house he is building in Majorca, his fondness of economics, the dogs he owns and Dalia, whom he describes as his de facto wife, his girlfriend of 15 years. “She knows me very well and is very supportive,” he briefly explains.

Aside from these glimpses, he is a very private man and is happier that way. Occasionally his two lives cross. In the 1993 race the news was broken to him while at sea that his father had died, and then in the last race he jumped off SEB so he could be taken home after he heard his mother had passed away. “Talking to someone over a satellite ‘phone when you are doing ridiculous speeds in the Southern Ocean you feel very powerless that you can’t be there. There’s nothing you can do about it,” was all he wanted to say on the topic. He could talk about navigation all day, likewise the changes he has seen in his ‘art’ and the sport as a whole. But Marcel doesn’t have all day. He has to get back to his charts and routing software, while other members of the crew enjoy a beer. It’s not unfair, that’s just the life of a navigator and whether you used an old compass or some electronic gadget it has always been that way. And as Marcel says, lonely as he is, he wouldn’t change it for the world.

Words : Riath Al-Samarrai, freelance sports writer.

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