Newport Daily News reporter takes the helm of 11th Hour Racing's boat Malāma

NEWPORT — Back in June 2021, vlogging from the middle of the Mediterranean during the inaugural Ocean Race Europe, 11th Hour Racing skipper and Bristol native Charlie Enright compared a windless day onboard an IMOCA 60 racing sailboat to the experience of driving a Ferrari in a parking lot.

I was left with the same impression when he handed me the tiller of the Malāma, even as we cruised past the Newport Pell Bridge at about 16 knots, a knot and a half faster than the wind speed.

Malāma, a one-of-one take on the IMOCA design class with sleek lines, space-age foils and a nearly enclosed cockpit, was custom-designed and built to win the 2022-2023 Ocean Race, a 32,000-nautical-mile around-the-world marathon. So letting me man the tiller felt a bit like letting a toddler drive the Ferrari, even if we were confined to the nautical equivalent of a parking lot.

Working a winch with the managing editor of Sail Magazine to raise the mainsail seemed like a more fitting responsibility for a sailor of my experience level. It also gave me a sense of how physically fit these crew members have to be to run their boat at peak performance.

As I started to sweat and feel the heat in my muscles, at least twice I thought navigator Simon Fisher was telling us we were all set with our task, but he was actually saying, “keep going,” and “you can actually raise it a bit faster.”

I tried to enjoy my moment at the helm while pondering the pent-up intensity of the entire operation, trying in vain to find something besides the scenery in common with my early memories of sailing and often bailing a Sunfish with my twin brother in the Kickemuit River.

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Even the scenery was a stretch, given that while actively sailing the entire crew often is located below deck in the cockpit, using a regulated auto-pilot system and a camera on deck to aid with navigation.

I had come into the day expecting to get salted by sea breeze and doused by ocean spray, but the experience was much more confined than I had anticipated, defined less by stunning visuals and sweeping landscapes and more by auditory experiences like the smacking of the waves on the hull, the grinding of the winches, the creaks and groans of taut lines and the constant communication between crew members preparing and executing maneuvers.

My first impression was the cockpit would be a good deal louder going more than 30 knots in strong winds and heavy seas, and my second impression was for these athletes, much of the 32,000-nautical-mile journey would be visually uniform, a close-up of the cockpit interior and a constant perusal of the charts and instruments.

The crew, currently tootling journalists around in circles just south of Newport Harbor and counting down the remaining days of what Enright politely referred to as “non-performance activity” before they cross the Atlantic back to France, is getting ready to lock into full-time training.

Like the boat itself, every member of the 11th Hour team is built to compete at the highest level, to push themselves to their absolute capacity, and to endure incredibly intense environments while sailing around the world as fast as humanly possible.

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Our day on Narragansett Bay, in contrast, did not call on the team to test the limits of their endurance and sanity. The sun was shining, the breeze was light and steady and the crew was relaxed, casually answering questions about the design process, the upcoming race and their own personal journeys as professional sailors.

I had a lot of questions for Fisher as he showed us the complex navigation equipment, the sleeping quarters and the “kitchen” (a single gas-powered kettle), as well as the humble blue bucket that serves as the head. I had actually been on custom racing sailboats a number of times before, just never out on the water, and never when they were completely built.

As I felt the water interact with the deck under me and watched the 11th Hour crew tack, crew members slipping past each other in the nearly enclosed cockpit to reef sails, adjust the foils and steer the boat, I felt like I was finally experiencing what had previously been a hypothetical conclusion to a chain of events I had witnessed many times as the son of a boatbuilder, when we used to visit my dad at what was then Goetz Custom Sailboats in Bristol.

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My brothers and I had watched the Goetz team build a Volvo Open 70 for the 2008 Ocean Race, a boat called “Il Mostro” and painted like a giant Puma sneaker. Over a decade later, I got to see firsthand how far the coevolution of offshore ocean racing and modern boatbuilding has brought the design process for the Ocean Race.

This is the first year the race will feature the IMOCA class, which has its origins in France and is typically sailed by either one or two people, and Malāma is the first IMOCA ever to be purpose-built for a crew of five to race around the world.

It is also the flagship of Newport-based, Wendy Schmidt-backed 11th Hour Racing’s broader goal of using competitive sailing to raise awareness about the need for environmental sustainability and active ocean advocacy. The boat’s name is a Hawaiian word that means “to take care for,” and environmental stewardship of the world’s oceans and coastlines plays a huge part in 11th Hour’s broader vision.

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Newport Harbor is the gateway to another world, where extreme athletes ply ancient trade routes on boats so fast they would seem like spaceships to the mariners who came before them.

The next time they come to town, members of the 11th Hour Racing team will be jockeying for position as they sail north from Itajai, Brazil, a short sprint in comparison to the record 12,750-nautical-mile leg from Cape Town that precedes it.

I was happy to step back onto dry land at Newport Shipyard and bask in the sun at Belle’s Café at the end of the day, but I know the 11th Hour team is itching to get out into the wild ocean and crank up to full intensity.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Newport Daily News reporter spends day on racing sailboat Malāma