I have not gybed a spinnaker pole since 1978. Oracle Racing coach Dave Ullman reminded me of this on our one and only practice day before the Bermuda Gold Cup in October. In 1978 I crewed for Dave Ullman in a 505 a few times and previous to that spent a lot of time on the front of 505

Well it is finally here, the 2001-2002 Volvo Ocean Race. I have been thinking about the teams for this year

I want to tell you how much fun sailing can be. First, I had to remember.

Sailing has become a career for me. Almost everyone looks at what the professional sailors do for a living with envy, and rightly so. We work hard but certainly we have a great job; doing what we enjoy, outdoors most of the time, working out daily so we are fit, traveling frequently and we get to compete. This would be a dream come true for any one and I am the first to acknowledge how lucky I am. That said, what has happened through the years, is that the sport I grew up being so passionate about has become my job. And like all jobs, it is less exciting than when we were amateurs racing on the weekends or attending our first world championship. Recently I have had a flashback and I my enthusiasm for the sport, and my job, has been heightened.

Sometime last fall, I was thinking about the next three years and what sailing I would be doing. Seemingly headed right back down the America

Well I guess I got a bit overly excited about the Race in my last column. That is the difficult part of writing for a magazine. Three days after I wrote my piece saying how great the Race looked, King Louie smash his boat into a wave, took out two of his wingmen and the race got a lot less interesting. Congratulations to Grant Dalton and the crew of Club Med. Preparation was as important as ever. Why wasn

Two weeks into it, I find myself following the progress of The Race with great interest. The story of the these large Cats, from pre-birth to the fast progress they are currently making as they rip across the Equator on their southbound track, is quite compelling…to me at least. At the time of this writing, their still remains a lot of anticipation about how things will go during the four weeks that they will spend south 40 degrees south. Although I haven