" I Can Only Compete Through My Crew."

It's Toughest When the Going Gets Easy

The most challenging sailing was in the Southern Ocean. But the leadership challenge was comparatively easy. "It was muck and bullets -- battleground leadership," recalls Walker. "These guys were hanging on by their fingernails. As long as I was technically competent, leading was pretty straightforward."

In terms of leading, it was toughest when the going got easy. That would be the race's "Paradise Leg," from Cape Town to Boston. At 7,000 miles, it is the longest leg of the race. But the crews are sailing downwind with the spinnaker up. They're cruising through the tropics, and their biggest worry is whether to use SPF 20 or 30 sunscreen. Forget fear. Now downtime takes a toll. There's gossip. And the skipper starts to earn his paycheck.

The crew's morale bottomed out when the Wave Warrior hit the Doldrums, an area near the equator that is notorious for its calms and its light, shifting winds. As they approached the equator, all of the data on weather, wind, and currents pointed toward taking a westerly route. But they were in second place, about one day behind the leader, the Group 4. Gambling to make up time, Walker and his navigational gurus plotted an easterly route instead.

They turned east and, soon after, lost the bet. The wind dropped, they missed the most favorable position to cross the Doldrums, and they slipped to eleventh place. Fed up with the conditions, members of the crew began to lose faith in their strategy. One crew member complained that he had wasted three years of his life training for the race. The solution was to reset the goal. "I called the crew up on deck, and we discussed what had happened," says Walker. " 'We're in the eleventh position,' I told them. 'We can't think about winning. We're going to set ourselves new targets to beat as many boats as we can, one boat at a time.' "

The first goal: Pass the tenth-place boat, which was five miles ahead of the Toshiba Wave Warrior, within the next 12 hours. The crew members did it. Then, they overtook the next boat and the one after that. Some 1,000 miles later, the Wave Warrior stormed into Boston in third place. "The race was all about learning: The team that learned the fastest would win," says Walker. "My ambition was for the crew to learn so well that they wouldn't need me. I really feel that a leader's goal should be to make himself redundant."

Walker believes that the crew achieved his ambition when they sailed into Boston Harbor. It was quite a challenge. After 7,000 miles at sea, the prospect of suddenly coming into land is daunting. Nevertheless, the crew raised the boat's big red spinnaker -- 4,000 square feet of sail -- and raced hard. They piloted around rocks and through reefs outside the harbor, past navigation lanes, lighthouses, and buoys inside it. To alter course, they jibed. That is, they changed the sail from one side to the other -- a complicated maneuver on such a large boat. When the boat was closer to the wind, the crew had to peel, or raise a new spinnaker on the inside and trip the large spinnaker away. In all, they did seven jibes and two peels sailing into Boston. Every move was flawless.

As for Walker, he stood on the deck and took photos. "I thought, What an achievement. These so-called amateurs have transformed themselves into one of the most professional crews I've ever sailed with." Walker had made himself redundant.

Built to Lap

The learning never stopped, even on the last day of the race. Two miles from the finish line at Southampton, England, the Toshiba Wave Warrior had to double back around one last buoy. For the final time, the crew took the spinnaker down and raised the headsail -- without a hitch.

"But then I noticed two of the guys standing on the foredeck," says Walker. "They were pointing up at the mast, discussing something. It turns out that one of them had noticed some small thing, and they were talking about a better way to take the spinnaker down. It was absolutely incredible. Here they had done this sail change a thousand times before, and they were never going to do it again. But the culture of continuous improvement, of reviewing and revising everything, was so ingrained in them that they were still looking for a better way -- even when the race was all but over.

"Some of the other boats did everything exactly the same way, from start to finish. On our boat, there wasn't a single operation at the end of the race that we did the same way as in the beginning. You were learning, changing, and evolving all the time. If you weren't, you were dead."

The crew learned fast, but not fast enough. In the end, the Wave Warrior never did catch the Group 4. After 30,000 miles, the two boats finished second and first, respectively. But the Wave Warriors drubbed the rest of the fleet.