“Extreme” is a word that organizers and sailors like to use to describe the Volvo Ocean Race. “Brutal” might be more accurate. The nine-month, thirty-nine-thousand-mile race, split into nine legs, crosses four oceans and eleven countries in six continents. Sailors must endure the persistent pounding of waves, unbearable temperatures, constant dampness, sleep deprivation, cramped quarters, and isolation. It's a grind, emotionally and physically. The race is not without danger; the required body bag on board each boat is a grim reminder of that. Five people have died since the race began, in 1973, as the Whitbread Round the World Race. Up until this year, nineteen boats have failed to make the finish. A recent crash has almost certainly pushed that number to twenty.

At the end of November, ten days into the race’s second leg—a three-and-a-half-week-long sail from Cape Town, South Africa, to Abu Dhabi—Team Vestas Wind, sponsored by a Danish wind-energy company, was in fifth place among the seven-boat fleet. The six-million-dollar, sixty-five-foot sloop was skippered by Chris Nicholson, a forty-five-year-old Australian with four Volvo races under his belt. It was moving nineteen knots shortly after sunset (7:10 P.M. local time) on November 29th when it slammed into a coral reef, part of an archipelago named St. Brandon, two hundred and sixty-eight miles off the coast of Mauritius.

Grainy black-and-white video from the boat’s helm camera shows crew members peering over the port side before two loud crashes are heard and an impact rattles the camera.

The immediate damage was massive. The collision broke off the twin stern rudders and punched through the boat’s hull, flooding the berth with seawater and eventually swamping the electrical system.

Within minutes, Nicholson alerted race control in Alicante, Spain. The nine crew members were uninjured, so his initial plan was to remain on board until daybreak, waiting for rescue with life rafts deployed. The challenge would lie in trying to hang on to a crippled boat while getting pounded again and again onto the reef. The bow was now jutting out and facing the waves.

“We had to just hang on through that with the boat breaking up around us,” Nicholson told race control a day after the crash, according to transcripts provided by race organizers.

Back in Alicante, the race-control team rushed to prepare for different emergency scenarios, like a man overboard or a helicopter evacuation. Organizers directed the ship’s closest competitor, the Turkish-sponsored American Team Alvimedica, to sail to Team Vestas Wind’s location.

Alvimedica skipper Charlie Enright had been concerned about the St. Brandon shoals as his boat approached from the south on Saturday. He knew from charts, G.P.S., and his navigation system that it was a tricky patch—basically a flat coral reef covered by about four feet of water.

Just more than two and a half hours after the crash, Alvimedica was a mile away from the wreck scene, where it stayed until the Vestas crew was safely off the boat. Alvimedica acted as the rescue effort’s eyes and ears, broadcasting updates from the wreck back to race control, in Alicante, and standing by in case Vestas needed emergency assistance. A tight bond had grown between the two crews after sharing thousands of nautical miles sailing against each other. Though fierce competitors, Volvo sailors take seriously the leave-no-man-behind ethos.

Through the night, the Vestas crew practiced drills to abandon ship some twenty times, never thinking it would become a reality—not in the dark at least.

They had already deployed one life raft and it had drifted to the far side of the reef. The crew was not sure if they could reach it now. They couldn’t afford to lose their one remaining raft, and so deployed a buoy to try to gauge the ocean’s speed and direction.





1 / 7 Chevron Chevron Courtesy Brian Carlin/Team Vestas Wind/Volvo Ocean Race Team Vestas Wind grounded on a reef more than two hundred miles off the coast of Mauritius.

The conditions did not improve as the night wore on. Eight hours after the crash, with two hours still remaining until daylight, the keel bulb broke off and the boat leaned heavily to starboard. The boat’s stern cracked off. Finally, the deck started to fold.

The skipper reassessed the situation. The first lesson in sailing is always stay with the boat. Abandoning the ship is the last resort, a complete and final admission of failure. But Nicholson realized that the boat was badly damaged. The race around the world, an effort that cost more than twelve million dollars, was potentially over.

Nicholson could see that there was shallow water on the other side of the reef. The problem, he said, was that for most of the night they couldn’t safely get there: “Basically the boat has to destroy itself to end up more on the rocks and out of the breaking waves.”

One hour before dawn on Sunday, Nicholson and his crew finally slipped off the listing Vestas and waded over the flats, through shark- and barracuda-infested waters, to a life raft that they had tethered to a rock.