Seaworthy Volvos parking at Annapolis

ANNAPOLIS — “They are so beautiful, and so powerful,” says Gary Jobson of the boats sailing around the world in the Volvo Ocean Race.

The Annapolis sailor, TV commentator and author, named Admiral of the Chesapeake in 2005 by Maryland’s governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., will serve as master of ceremonies this afternoon as Annapolis welcomes the fleet of seven Volvo ocean racers into port to anchor this weekend’s Maryland Maritime Heritage Festival.

“You need to see the boats up close,” he says. “At this level, the challenge of sailing these things becomes an art.”

These miracles of sail left Vigo, Spain, in November. They sailed to Cape Town, South Africa; Melbourne, Australia; Wellington, New Zealand and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — a distance of 20,650 nautical miles — and then set out on a 5,000-nautical-mile fifth leg to Baltimore, where they blew into port, surrounded by celebratory small craft, on April 17.

Their stay in Annapolis is comparatively short: They leave on Leg 6 for a New York pit stop Sunday morning and from there head for Portsmouth, England, and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. They’ll finish in June in Goteborg, Sweden, after 31,250 nautical miles of sea and spray.

That’s a bit less than 36,000 of the kind of miles landlubbers log in their SUVs — and it’s formidable.

“If I had one message for families coming down to see all this,” Mr. Jobson says, “it would be to let your imagination go when you’re around these boats.”

Down to the sea again

The history brims with the exhilaration and terror of a bout with the sea.

What is now the Volvo Ocean Race traces its beginnings to the Golden Globe, the first nonstop solo race around the world by sail. With prize money put up by the Sunday Times of London in 1968-1969, nine sailors entered. Only one finished. The others succumbed to equipment failures, depression or despair. One abandoned a sinking ship. One sank into madness and jumped overboard.

Inspired by the idea of the Golden Globe but focused on crewed boats, in 1973 the British brewery Whitbread teamed with the Royal Navy Sailing Association to organize the Volvo’s immediate predecessor — the Whitbread ‘Round the World Race, a regatta for crewed sailboats covering about 31,000 miles in stages. Of the 17 entries in the first race, 14 made it to the finish line nine months later. Three men were lost at sea.

The Swedish car and truck maker Volvo, now a division of the Ford Motor Co., took over corporate sponsorship of the quadrennial Whitbread race in 2001 and named it after itself.

The Whitbread, and now the Volvo, race is far from the only ‘round-the-world ordeal that grew from the Golden Globe. Two solo yacht races — the staged BOC Challenge (now the Velux 5 Oceans Race), first run in 1982, and the non-stop Vendee Globe, begun in 1989 — are run once every four years, as is the Global Challenge for crewed steel yachts, called “the world’s toughest race” because its boats sail against prevailing winds and currents.

The last time the Volvo racers came to Annapolis, four years ago, as many as 500,000 visitors hit the city’s docks to ogle the splendid sailing ships. Since then, the $25-million-and-higher boats have gotten bigger and faster — they’re 70 feet long, with 100-foot masts, and can make up to 46 miles an hour on sail power alone in high wind.

A support team of some 500 technicians and craftsmen follows the fleet, moving from port to port by air and ship to patch up and help keep the expensive sailing yachts afloat and racing. Lonely family members fly in, too, to catch up with their loved ones.

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