Sailing: Williams takes Baltic honours as calls to unify racing calendar intensify

Recently Colin Montgomerie, a man who has received a few cheques in his time, said that when he leaves the professional golf circuit, one of the things he would really like to do is experience the atmosphere on a Volvo Ocean Race offshore racing yacht. Invitations are already being arranged, but he will find an area of professional sport very different from his own.

Only a handful of sailors make what would be a journeyman's wage in Premier League football and the conditions probably break all employment rules. One thousand dollars a day - and that is at the top end - may sound a lot, but the day is a 24-hour one and may include the odd gale. There will be just one hot meal of gooey pasta.

On Saturday, in Marstrand, Sweden's leading sailing centre on the west coast, a New Zealander called Erle Williams stepped up to receive the trophy on behalf of Team RS as overall winner of the misleadingly-named Volvo Baltic Race.

It was a six-event series, though one was cancelled, the final, bruising 510-miler clinching a fortnight's work which had seen the fleet of 60-foot former Volvo Ocean Race yachts move from Kiel up the Baltic, and then take in a testing Round Gotland Race to cover more than 1,300 miles in three offshore chunks.

Williams received rousing applause and could also savour the satisfaction of winning the needle match against Britain's Matt Humphries, whose Challenge Gant had suffered some cruel luck when both yachts were becalmed within 50 miles of Marstrand and RS had sailed away in a private streak of strengthening breeze.

Williams and Humphries had been senior colleagues at the start of the 2001-2002 Volvo Ocean Race on what was then SEB, but Humphries had parted company with his skipper, Gunnar Krantz, in Auckland and then joined the rival NewsCorp with Ross Field in Rio de Janiero.

Now a successor SEB, still run by Krantz, Williams had seven fellow Kiwis with enough America's Cup and round-the-world experience to win instant respect in any dockside bar. Considering how quickly they had put the campaign together, starting just nine days before they left Kiel, this was professionalism of the highest order.

Humphries had two GBR Challenge America's Cup men, Jonathan Taylor and Jim Turner, one Stars & Stripes man, Tony Rey, and one Team New Zealand man, Cameron Appleton. He had other round the world experience in Gareth Cooke and Marcel van Triest, and, in Scott Beavis, a bowman with a lot of miles under his belt for one so young.

Next stop for all of them is uncertain in a world where lives can resemble those of actors, making good money one year and scratching around the next.

Which is why Humphries is such a vociferous supporter of an event such as the Volvo Baltic Race. For years those doing a round the world race every four years have said they need other events in the intervening period to keep their teams going, and their sponsors to have continuity.

But, the world of sailing in general, and offshore racing in particular, is in a mess. There is no umbrella organisation to regulate the calendar and ensure the sort of structure that allows the pros to plan sensibly. Either a forceful individual, like a Bernie Ecclestone, or the sport's world governing body, the International Sailing Federation, could grab the initiative, say some. But the sport is so maverick that no individual could enforce anything except in a narrow area, and the ISAF is so ineffective to prevent dog-eat-dog struggles between one event and another that it makes Thatcherism look like the co-operative movement.

It is the same when it comes to the development and production of racing boats. Every week there is an announcement of yet another type of yacht that claims to be the answer to 100 years of prayer, or a new handicap rule that allows a bus to race against a Ferrari on equal terms. There are so many champions that the term becomes meaningless.

The inaugural Volvo Baltic Race provides at least the semblance of a solution at the fully-crewed, professional end - the largely French-dominated Open 60s and 60-foot trimarans are more for single or short-handed racing - to the need for continuity. But one of the beefs that the new Volvo Ocean Race chief executive officer, Glenn Bourke, would like to see tackled by ISAF is some regulation of the calendar.

There are really only three big shows in the sailing town, the Olympic Games, the America's Cup and the Volvo Ocean Race.

Sharing the Marstrand stage was the final event of the world tour, the Swedish Match Cup. The winner, Britain's Chris Law, took a $60,000 share of a $200,000 prize fund, but it is an event that can easily be disrupted if the major players are taken out of play for five months, as they were in 2002-2003, by an event such as the America's Cup. The main problem remains, however, that anyone can organise any race any time anywhere without so much as a by your leave from anyone. Conformist Volvo wants to work within the ISAF, but can expect no protection from them against predatory events. The Swedish Match tour feels it cannot work with the ISAF, which runs its own world championship of match racing in Italy next month. Even the America's Cup wants to operate outside the ISAF's control.

Humphries would like to see three years of the Volvo Baltic Race, with the Pacific tour starting after the new 70-foot boats are introduced in 2005-2006. "We need discipline at the cutting edge of the sport if it is to thrive," he says. "I think there is a new culture coming to sustain the lives of professional sailors." Monty's agent would be bewildered.