Up a mast or a wave, life's a high for bowman Beavis

By MICHELE HEWITSON

There are days when even the most resolute of landlubbers find themselves indulging in a little desk-bound fantasy about the attractions of running away to sea.

Summer has arrived and if I poke my nose out of the office window I can catch a hint of brine borne past on the diesel fumes.

It takes 10 happy minutes to run away from the office. Down to a glimpse of water as benign as a child's painting done in streaky ultramarine, sprinkled with glitter.

In a tent at the end of the marina down at the Viaduct Harbour is a bloke who seldom has the smell of brine out of his nostrils.

The tent is the Auckland headquarters of the Team SEB syndicate.

It is here that the crew and their support team have been hanging out on their 24-day stopover before heading out into the Southern Ocean for the fourth leg of the Volvo Ocean Race, 6700 nautical miles from Auckland to Rio de Janeiro.

The SEB syndicate is Swedish. Inside the tent is a bar with tidy lines of Swedish vodka and comfortable Swedish chairs.

The man who wanders into the tent looking hot and tired and wearing a few days of blond stubble on his chin and old grazes on his knees might as well enjoy a bit of comfort while he can.

At 22, Scott Beavis, bowman, is the youngest of the SEB team. He is a Northcote boy who first got into a boat aged 6, first sailed alone at 9, and who decided at 17 that running away to sea seemed like a good way to make a living.

His mother, Sue, who thinks he is mad (she has to take sea-sickness medication just to stand on the edge of a marina to farewell him) is a dental hygienist. Beavis has very good teeth.

His father, John, is a mechanical engineer who has sailed the Sydney-to-Hobart race. Scott Beavis has very good sea legs.

He left Northcote College halfway through his seventh form year, bought an air ticket to America, and worked his way around every yachting event on offer.

Beavis returned to New Zealand, went to work as a sailmaker at North Sails, was offered a job sailing in Sweden and was chosen to sail in his first round-the-world yacht race. And now here he is.

Where he is, is sitting uncomfortably in one of these comfortable chairs.

He is perfectly amiable but you can tell that he'd far rather be hit on the head by a boom than (a) have to sit still for longer than 10 minutes and (b) have to talk about himself for longer than 10 seconds.

Still, that sponsor-emblazoned gear he's sporting has to be paid for.

He is happiest when leaving a port. He is not staying at home while in Auckland. "It's hard to get back into the living-at-home lifestyle."

He is not concerned that he won't be able to settle back into normal life. "This will be my normal life."

A normal life where the preferred topic of conversation is "sail shapes and why you lost a little bit [of speed] here and there".

The backdrop to our conversation is a large map showing the race route punctuated with yellow triangles sprouting shrieking exclamation marks. Whales! Waves! Icebergs! Hurricane!

I can't spot a sign saying: Are you mad? But there should be one.

Because when the 12-man crew leave Auckland tomorrow their journey will take them through the icy wastes of the Southern Ocean. Then they will round Cape Horn, where steep undersea gradients can form waves up to 25m high.

W HEN sailors get together they swap sea stories. But you have to drag out of Beavis the story of his worst day at sea - so far.

On the third day of the Southampton-to-Cape Town leg SEB's mainsail fell. Sailing up-wind along the Brazilian coast in 35-knot winds, in the dark, Beavis says the crew "heard a bit of a bang".

At daybreak Beavis went up the 27m rig, swung out from the mast once, swung in and broke his nose.

Thrown against the mast again, he gashed his head.

"When I came back down," he says mildly, "I wasn't too happy." He supposes he might have been a bit concussed.

He had a lie-down, "for about half an hour, had a few painkillers".

You begin to understand why, when Beavis gets a phone call from the mate he's lent his car to saying he's blown the engine, that he is as cool as glacier ice.

He asks whether it is parked safely, and finishes the call with a "sweet as".

From dry land and his Swedish chair he finishes his "worst day" story. He's laughing: "It's a stupid sport."

Well, it is, isn't it? The crew have one change of clothes each, they share the five sleeping bags and the one knife, four plates and four spoons that double as forks.

Their living quarters are three metres by eight. They're wet all the time, too cold, or too hot, they've got mush to eat.

It's just miserable, isn't it?

"It's really nice, or really exciting. At other times it's just the worst thing you could ever do in your life. At least once a day you think: 'What am I doing?"'

For a while I think Beavis is nervous, or bored: he doesn't make eye contact.

But then he says, "There's the Southern Ocean," and I realise that he's been watching the last leg on the large video screens above our heads.

(Actually, he is a bit bored. He's let slip that he's supposed to be surfing this afternoon. But he is polite enough to apologise for having said it.)

It looks terrifying: huge seas, waves washing over the deck. A bunch of men dwarfed by water.

Beavis' eyes are bright with the vicarious pleasure of reliving it.

Not that sailors are prone to getting carried away.

"You see some nice things," he says. "A bit of wildlife ... It's a lot of water."

The Southern Ocean is "just another place to go sailing really".

Beavis talks about the camaraderie, the all-male bonding. Round-the-world sailors talk about sailing, food and chicks. "If you're leaving port, it's more chicks. If you're coming towards port, it's more food."

The rest of us want to talk about those icebergs, and huge waves and how frightening it must be. I suspect that if the people who do it did talk about it, they wouldn't do it.

Why does he do it?

"I'll be able to look back and think, 'Wow. I just sailed around the world'."

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