" I Can Only Compete Through My Crew."

Knowledge Dispels Fear

There's an old mariner's expression: "No law, no God." Go beyond 40 degrees south latitude, and you're in the Southern Ocean. Figuratively, you're beyond the reach of all nations. Go past 50 degrees south, and you're beyond the limits of civilization itself and into a world that is utterly alien. At its southernmost extreme, the 6,600-mile leg from Rio de Janeiro to New Zealand took the fleet to 60 degrees south. No law, no God -- and for the crew members, big fear.

Walker and his crew sailed from Rio de Janeiro down the coast of South America, turned west at Cape Horn, and hit the ferocity of the Southern Ocean. Cape Horn is feared for its bad weather and its big seas. The reasons are geographical. Westerly winds shriek across the earth's surface, unimpeded by any major landmass. The winds, storms, and currents combine to whip up huge seas, driving rough waves on top of massive swells. If that weren't enough, the seabed at Cape Horn shelves dramatically from around 10,000 feet up to several hundred feet. Like waves breaking on a beach, the shallower seabed forces waves to pile up on themselves, compressing them and making them even steeper, sharper, and uglier.

Andrea Bacon of the Group 4 recalls trying to steel herself in the safety of the companionway before climbing onto the deck and into the maelstrom. "The yacht was heeling over at 35 degrees, and the effort to get up the steps was beyond belief," she says. "Terrified and speechless, I huddled low, clipped on my safety harness, and held on to the nearest secure objects as waves crashed over my head. The one thing that I dreaded was having to let go and do something."

Still, to survive, the crews had to sail. That meant changing sails in 60-knot winds and massive seas -- as towering sheets of water surged over the yacht's bow. Walker used several tactics for tamping fear. The first was a simple one: He gave his crew members a real-world account of what to expect. "Knowledge dispels fear," he says. "So we talked through every scenario: what we'd encounter when we rounded Cape Horn, what we'd do if we hit an iceberg or had our rig damaged. If you told them that Cape Horn would be easy, and then they got the shit knocked out of them, they'd never trust you again, would they? Still, you stay positive. You tell them that it's going to be tough, but we're prepared for it, and that the boat is strong. It's about saying what you can do, not what you can't."

Walker doesn't flinch from admitting that he, too, was scared. What then? On a racing yacht at sea, a leader can only confide in his team -- if he chooses to confide at all.

"If I shared all of my worries and woes with one person, he'd think that I was completely losing it. So my strategy was to choose a number of people, and share one element of my worries with each of them -- but just that one element. So, for example, I'd go to Spike, our doctor, and tell him that I'm worried about Jo's broken arm. Or I'd go to our engineer and tell him that the rig doesn't look so good.

"No one was getting the whole picture, thank God," laughs Walker. "But confiding in each of them was the only way for me to handle the loneliness of command, which is very, very real."

He was right to worry about the rigging. They were deep in the Southern Ocean, halfway between Cape Horn and New Zealand, when the standing rigging failed. Someone would have to climb 60 feet up the mast and replace a steel fitting that joined the rigging to the mast -- a job that entailed slackening an entire side of the rigging. It was here that Walker's third tactic for handling fear kicked in: In a high-risk situation, a leader chooses the best person for the job. In this case, it turned out that the best person was the leader himself.

"We were out there in the Southern Ocean, feeling very insignificant in a big part of the planet," recalls Walker. "At any minute, another storm would sweep in. We hatched a plan: Spike and I would climb up and jury-rig the fitting. As we started the climb, I told the crew that they must helm the yacht very carefully on the opposite tack, as the rigging was only holding up one side of the mast. If the helmsman made a mistake while we were up on the mast, we'd crash down over the side with the entire rig on top of us."

If that were to happen, the crew quite possibly would have lost both its skipper and its rig to the world's harshest seas. Why take on such a risk? "Because I was young, I was fit, but most importantly, I was a member of the team," Walker says. "And sending me up there was the best use of the team's resources. So I did it."