Lachlan jumped at the chance. “Absolutely. I’d love to.”
Lachlan had learned to sail from his father, who raced small boats in his twenties and thirties. (Rupert still sailed, but it was mostly on a vast yacht designed to be comfortable rather than fast. “It’s so big, it’s not really a sailboat anymore,” said Lachlan, who bought his own boat in 1995, which he named Karakoram for the mountain range that includes K2.) Lachlan sailed as much as he could. “For someone who has a job that keeps their mind kind of ticking over all the time, it’s a great way to force yourself to think about something other than work.” He had raced his own boat in the 1997 Hobart, and he thought he would learn a lot from crewing on Sayonara.
After leaving his house Saturday morning, Lachlan arrived at a restaurant near the CYC in time for a crew meeting. It was conducted by Chris Dickson, who had replaced Paul Cayard as Sayonara’s professional skipper a couple of years earlier. In a room where the walls and tables were painted with nautical scenes and old sails hung from the ceiling, Dickson spoke from two pages of typewritten notes, conducting the meeting as if it were a corporate planning session.
“Meals. We have three dinners, and we should figure on a three-day race. If we do it in two and a half, that’s great; but we should plan on three days.
“Bunks. Larry and I have assigned bunks, so if you need us in a hurry, you’ll know where to find us.
“The start. There will be a hunded and fifteen boats at the starting line. We do twice the speed as the small boats, and we don’t want to have a collision. If you’re not busy, keep your head down. We have to keep the noise down. The warning gun goes at twelve-fifty.
“Brindabella. We have to keep an eye on them. They’re very strong, and it’s clearly the boat we have to beat.”
When he was done, Dickson introduced Roger “Clouds” Badham, a consulting meteorologist who made his living providing forecasts to yachtsmen and was so highly regarded that America’s Cup contenders regularly competed for his services. Clouds, as he was called by everyone, ran through the specifics of his forecast, which called for pleasant weather on Saturday and worsening conditions thereafter. Then he looked up from his notes and spoke plainly: “It’s going to be tough out there. There’s a pretty good chance it could be really tough—and if it is, you could be in for a nightmare of a race.”
Ellison, who had skipped the meeting so he could take a walk with Melanie, stepped onto Sayonara at eleven. By then Robbie Naismith and Tony Rae, two of Team New Zealand’s key members, were doing a final inventory of the sails they were taking for the race. Other crewmen were replacing the floorboards, which had been removed so that a dehumidifier could suck up moisture from the bilge. Chris Dickson and Mark Rudiger were standing in the cockpit discussing tactics. The rest of the crew was milling about the deck, bantering with sailors from nearby boats and trying to relax. Sayonara often attracted lots of attention because of its famous owner and track record, and the crowd was even larger than normal because of Lachlan and his photogenic fiancée. After saying hello to Lachlan and Sarah, Ellison sat down in the cockpit with Dickson.
Dickson was a crucial ingredient to Sayonara’s success. Like Ellison, he was intense and demanding. “We have an uncompromising commitment to winning,” the thirty-seven-year-old New Zealander would say of his approach to managing Sayonara. “We don’t accept excuses for anything. We have an absolutely ruthless approach to doing the best we can.”
Even back when he started winning junior championships in Auckland, Dickson’s friends talked about his competitive zeal and killer instinct. Three times he was named New Zealand’s junior sailing champion. In 1987, he was the skipper of Kiwi Magic, the first New Zealand yacht to compete for the America’s Cup, held that year in Fremantle, Australia. Dickson lost only one of the first thirty-four races leading up to the selection of the challenger; but in the final round of the challenger races, he lost to Dennis Conner, who went on to win the Cup.
Since then, Dickson had competed in two other America’s Cups and the 1993–94 Whitbread Race. It was in the latter that he had the most impact. In previous years, yachts had carried full-time chefs to prepare hot meals that were sometimes accompanied by wine. Dickson brought nothing but freeze-dried food and drinks that were called milk shakes but were actually synthetic concoctions designed to deliver various nutritional supplements efficiently. “By bringing America’s Cup discipline to the race, Dickson changed the Whitbread forever,” said T. A. McCann, who crewed on Dickson’s boat.
Dickson was famous for his capacity to intimidate the world’s greatest sailors and for the way he always asked for more. Once while training for the 1987 America’s Cup, his crew thought they were done for the day until Dickson said, “Let’s do ten more tacks.” Then there were ten more, and another ten. On an America’s Cup boat, every tack—turning the boat so that the wind approaches from a different side—is hard work. The repetition of quickly cranking in the big sails was like an unbroken series of wind sprints. Tony Rae, who was trimming the mainsail and who also performed that job for Team New Zealand and Sayonara, still remembered the afternoon. “Everyone knew that any suggestion that we had done enough would have been rewarded with more work. In the end, we did fifty tacks.”
Before he hired Dickson, Ellison had asked T. A. McCann, an America’s Cup veteran who had sailed on Sayonara for all of its races, the kind of questions he always posed when looking for something: “Who’s the best sailor you’ve ever sailed with? Who’s the best sailor in the world?”
“It’s not even close—it’s Chris Dickson,” T.A. replied. Like everyone who had sailed with Dickson, T.A. had suffered from his wrath, but he believed that was a price worth paying. “He’s a fanatical perfectionist who has a terrible reputation for being hard on people,” T.A. told Ellison, “but he’s the most talented sailor alive today.”
Dickson reminded Ellison of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer and Ellison’s best friend. Like Jobs, Ellison said, “Dickson wants to do everything perfectly, all the time. He’s so brilliant at what he does and so unforgiving of himself that he becomes unforgiving of others.” But while Ellison tried to rationalize Dickson’s rough edges, he was also a bit amazed. “Dickson will yell at Joey Allen,” Ellison said, referring to the principal bowman on Sayonara and Team New Zealand. “That is unbelievable. Joey Allen is the best bowman in the world.”
While Dickson would be responsible for sailing the boat and managing the crew, Mark Rudiger, a forty-four-year-old Californian who rarely cracked a smile, would make many of the strategic decisions. In the 1993–94 Whitbread Race, which Dickson would have won if his mast hadn’t snapped toward the end of the contest, Rudiger was the winning yacht’s navigator. Ellison considered him the world’s best.
Rudiger, who usually hunched to bring his six-foot five-inch height down to other people’s, began sailing across oceans in the 1960s when his parents took him out of school to circumnavigate the world. By the time he was twenty, he was back in California, where he bought a broken-down boat that he raced single-handed. While attending a maritime academy, he began learning about navigation. In years since, the role of the navigator had changed dramatically because of technological advances. With the introduction of the satellite-based Global Positioning System, or GPS, which determines location by triangulating off satellite signals, one of the most important tasks—determining a vessel’s location—had become a matter of pushing a button. Navigators had begun to spend most of their time making strategic decisions about the best course to sail. Understanding