Immerse yourself in Charlie Enright’s journey through ocean racing, delve into his collaboration with 11th Hour Racing, and uncover how sustainability played a vital role in their victorious ocean race team.
Read Zig Sailing Insider’s Ty Christopher Olsen’s interview with Charlie Enright, winning skipper of the 2022-23 Ocean Race, a 32,000 nautical race around the world.
Charlie Enright - The Ocean Race and Sustainability
Working up to the Challenge
TCO: Charlie can you tell us a little bit about your early years of sailing and how it became such a big focus in your life?
CE: Sure, I grew up in Bristol, RI, which is kind of like its own little maritime epicenter. I was fortunate enough to have a grandfather who was a boat builder, so I got into the whole boating thing at an early age. I am inherently a very competitive person, so once I started racing it was always what’s next, what’s next…., and that’s going back as far as sailing Opti’s up to Lasers, 420’s, inter-scholastically and even into my offshore days. Nothing ever seemed to be enough!
In my college years, I had the opportunity to be a part of the movie “Morning Light.” I guess that was when I started to realize that there was a way to just keep sailing. There was something more to this than just weekend regattas. That is truly when I fell in love with the offshore aspect of the sport, and when the quest for The Ocean Race really began. I wanted to reach the pinnacle of offshore racing and that’s what the Ocean Race represented. Just as much as I like the competitiveness of sailing, I also love the adventurous side of it as well. It became very aspirational for me. As we started to chip away at our quest to compete, everything started to feel more tangible. Then suddenly we were doing it, and then we were doing it 3 times, and now we have achieved our ten-years long Holy Grail!
In the Movies
TCO: So, during the movie “The Morning Light,” you played the role of being a rookie sailor. Were you actually a rookie at that time or had your career already hit the takeoff point?
CE: Well, I had done some offshore racing, but certainly no 2000-mile passages or trans-oceanic passages or anything like that. I had cut my teeth on some local stuff, but that was certainly the beginning of bigger projects to come.
TCO: When you and Mark Towill crewed together on the boat during the film, did you ever imagine that winning The Ocean Race would be in your future?
CE: Umm, that might be a tad far-fetched, but certainly Mark and I became very tight during that project, and we ended up going to school together after that. That is where we really decided we were going to give it a go, and I guess we always believed we could do it, or we wouldn’t have tried. Lets just say we had a lot of faith in our ideas and each other!
11th Hour Racing
TCO: How did your relationship with 11th Hour Racing begin?
CE: It started in 2011 when we put together something called the Oakcliff All-American Offshore Racing Team, which was a follow on from “Morning Light” and precusor to our Ocean Race campaigns. Way back then, 11th Hour provided us with some funding to buy organic freeze-dried food. After that we just kept the relationship alive. Our relationship reignited during our first lap around the planet when they sponsored the Ocean Summit, which was the first of whats now many Ocean Summits, during the Newport, RI stopover in 2015. Then in 2017, they became co-title sponsors of
the Vestas 11th Hour Racing, and then they became the sole title sponsor of our last effort in 2019 and that concluded at the end of 2023. So, all in all, it has been over a decade that we have been working with the folks at 11th Racing.
Sustainability Strategy
TCO: So, Charlie, I was doing a little research and in reading one of your reports, you wrote “the mission is to run a high-performance ocean racing team with sustainability at the core of all operations.” How did you tackle that mission? With such a big task at hand, where do you begin?
CE: It really comes down to your decision-making matrix. Most campaigns run strictly on cost benefit, but we ran a campaign on cost benefit with an emphasis on impact. So, there was always another factor that came into play when we were making critical decisions relating to the campaign. A lot of our thoughts and ideas are subconscious. If you take a step back and look at everything through a different lens, you realize that you do have more choices than you might initially think.
The focus on sustainability started with our first campaign. At that point, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. The first campaign was a bit of an awakening for us as it pertained to sustainability and ocean health more specifically. Then came the next campaign with Vestas 11th Hour Racing. During that campaign we shared our knowledge of ocean health and sustainability with the broader community. In our last go around, it was like, alright we have talked about this a lot, but what are we actually going to do about it? We really focused this last effort on creating tangible change within the industry, leading by example. We wanted to show how you can run a high-performance team like this with sustainability as the key focus. This extended to our engagement with the scientific community. Particularly concerning topics such as ocean health, data collection methodologies, the utilization of renewable materials, etc. It really is a big canvas, which in some ways makes it intimidating but in other ways it presents a world of innumerable opportunity.
TCO: With the collection of so much data while you are on the water, where is that information collected and who does it go to?
CE: It really depends, we collect so much different information. Information from our OceanPak goes to climatologists. We measure for sea surface temperatures, salinity, dissolved CO2 and for trace elements required in the photosynthesis process. This works through a flow through system that is fully automated. All of this data is sent to scientist in real-time via our satellite communication tools.
In other instances we collect eDNA (environmental DNA). So we are essentially collecting traces of, or excretions from, flora and fauna that have been in that body of water within a certain time period. This data is a bit more post process. We collected water samples to look for microplastics. These samples are filtered, processed onboard and sent out afterwards. Sometimes, we set out drifter buoys with LAT/LONS that we get from NOAA. We report marine mammal sightings for population counts and migration patterns. We are doing a lot out there, and each testing process has an individual way of being recorded. With so much information being collected, sometimes I feel like only a fraction of it actually gets talked about.
TCO: How do you maintain your focus on the race while also prioritizing sustainability measures?
CE: Over the course of a 6-month experience, there is time to dedicate to the ocean health cause without sacrificing on the race performance side. To the extent that we could, we tried to automate lots of the testing and make it less hands on. I can’t say enough about how involved onboard reporter Amory Ross was with the onboard science program. For me personally, it was the most important part of the project, because we were actually doing something, not just talking about it.
TCO: With so much information being collected on so many levels, who set the sustainability strategy and guidelines?
CE: It’s a collaborative effort for sure. We had a sustainability team that was internal to our organization led by Damian Foxall and Amy Munro so we had an entire group focused specifically on the strategy.
TCO: In devising strategic ideas for enhancing the race team’s sustainability, did you start from the ground up, addressing existing issues, or did you take a top-down approach, identifying undiscovered facts and working backward to improve sustainability?
CE: Actually, I would say both. We must look at what opportunities the boat presents as one aspect. As you said, another way to approach it is, what problems are we actually here to resolve? Some of them may be a bit out of our scope, but others are certainly within our wheelhouse as a boat traveling around the world. We’ve truly used a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches to achieve the successes we achieved.
I am a big fan of the insetting concept. While I see the benefits of carbon credits, tree planting, and blue carbon initiatives like mangroves, they strike me somewhat like a form of “confession."
Sustainability Take-Aways & The Lessons Learned
TCO: I was reading through your Executive Summary. You stated that one of your key take-aways was: “sustainable sourcing, investment insetting, and policies that place reductions at the heart of decision making, are vital tools for driving positive change.” Can you explain this a bit more in layman’s terms?
CE: Yes, for sure. I guess taking a step back, we measure absolutely everything that we do in terms of impact, and sourcing is a huge part of that. Just take shipping for instance, if you run a global organization that is required to move things around the world, well, there is a good way to do that and a bad way to do that. When you ship things, sometimes it is better to do it as sea freight, sometimes its better by ground transport versus air transport. You also need to ask if you can get what you need in your own backyard? So, supply chain and logistics are a huge part of any footprint which is why we chose to focus on this in our campaign. Even just building the boat in France with renewable energy had a huge impact on the campaign’s overall carbon footprint as opposed to building the boat in a place that’s powered by a coal power plant.
It’s so important to do a deep dive into the impacts of your choices and how they factor into the overall sustainability of the program. Again, as I mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, most people don’t really think about the impact of the choices that they are making. If you can quantify it, you can make educated decisions that hugely effect your bottom line.
I am a big fan of the insetting concept. While I see the benefits of carbon credits, tree planting, and blue carbon initiatives like mangroves, they strike me somewhat like a form of “confession.” With insetting, if you take that resource that you would otherwise be allocating to a mangrove farm in Honduras and you reinvest it in your own supply chain and turn the delivery vehicle at your local chandlery’s into an EV, then all of a sudden everything starts seeming a little closer to home. It will have a long-term effect on the industry and it will be visible everyday. We worked with CDK Technologies who built our boat and did an energy study with them. They did several things to become more efficient, even re-insulating their ovens. The examples are innumerable.
The bottom line is that there is a better way to do things, and we are trying to figure out what these ways are. In some ways, we are fallible, everyone is fallible, but unless we go out and try to do these things in a new and innovative way, the standard and the norm in the industry is never going to change. So, you need to start somewhere, and we pride ourselves on finding ways to do things better.
TCO: I read an excerpt in another report that was published, in what you made, in my words, a bold statement. You stated, “competitive sailing is moving fast in the wrong direction and the pathway to net zero is becoming steeper.” What tangible things can the sport do to change this direction?
CE: Yes, well there is a lot that needs to happen. Acknowledging that the carbon footprint for building a IMOCA 60 today, far exceeds what it was back in 2010 is the first step in this process. Much of that has to do with foils, speed, advancements in technology, etc. The question is: Are we focusing the technology on the right things? A lot of our team technology was spent on experimenting with renewables. You know the best way to build a strong and light product today is virgin carbon fiber, but if we do not experiment with alternatives then that’s never going to change. If you need something that is just light and not too strong, something that is not a load bearing piece for instance, there are several alternative products that do a really good job. Recycled carbon fiber has 90% less carbon footprint than its virgin counterpart. We used loads of recycled carbon during our build. We experimented with flax and bamboo, as well as different construction methods. It’s not just about the material, it’s about the process, the vacuum bags, the bleeders, all that stuff and so much more. There are tons and tons of opportunities. We just need to make sure that these opportunities are refined and viable for the future
TCO: At the end of any leg of the race, did you ever look back that there was something that you might have missed, something or that you could have done better, regarding the sustainability focus?
CE: The first thing that comes to mind is insetting. I think that if we had championed the insetting cause earlier in the campaign, we could have allocated more resources to the supply chain and the industry early on. Unfortunately, that is something that came to us later in the piece. I think that moving forward there will be a bigger focus on insetting.
TCO: What do you believe is the most significant impact or lasting contribution that the 11th Hour Racing Team has made to the sport and the industry?
CE: Hopefully it is that we led by example, and that we brought a consciousness to the industry and to offshore racing, more specifically. I think that we left a pretty big impact on the race as a whole and with the IMOCA Class specifically. Through outreach and education, as well as the grant and grantees programs, we hopefully inspired change at an institutional level, and throughout the next generation.
I think by the end of the last race, everybody had some sort of sustainable initiative imbedded within their organization, or at the very least a tagline. We like to think that we might have played a part in that.
What about the sailing?
TCO: If you could recall one of the most memorable or challenging moments of The Ocean Race, what would it be?
CE: Well, as you could imagine, there are a few! To say the least, the race was a roller coaster! For a host of reasons, things did not start as we expected. At the start, we were not as competitive as we wanted to be, or at least that’s what the scores would have indicated. Some of that was boat reliability, some of it was the conditions, some of it was bad luck, some of it was us not sailing our best when we needed to. But from Brazil onwards we pulled it all together and we turned our team into a bit of a freight train. It was going to take something supernatural to derail us, which certainly happened with the collision in the Hague. To say the least, that was something that took all of us by surprise, but we rallied around it and did a really good job controlling what we could control. In the end it all worked out. There were certainly a lot of ups and downs, but what allowed us to prosper in the end was the team that we assembled and the people that we had around us. We were just lucky to have such a great group who supported us till the end. No one goes around the world unscathed, but this lap seemed pretty extraordinary!
Astronauts???
TCO: I did hear a rumor that you may have had some communication with people in space during the race……any truth to that?
CE: Well, ya! That was pretty funny. Sometimes the competition is so tight you lose track of the fact that you are circumnavigating the planet. Never was that more apparent than when you are in the Southern Ocean where you have this crazy feeling of isolation. We were at Point Nemo, which is the farthest point from land that you can possibly get on the planet. Then we realized that the people closest to us, besides our competitors, were the crew in the space station. So, we decided to reach out to the ISS Space Center. There is a strange connection between us in the remote Southern Ocean and someone looking down on it from 250 miles overhead!
TCO: Any chance you still keep in touch with any of them?
CE: Not really, but one of my kids had the opportunity to talk to the folks in the space station. He was like, “I think you know my dad”. The astronaut’s response was, “ya right.” Then he explained how they would have known me and after a few more details, they agreed, “heck yes, we do know your dad!”.
The Future of 11th Hour Racing
TCO: So, Charlie just one last question before I let you go. What is next on the horizon for you?
CE: (laughs) I don’t know actually! You don’t just flip a switch and unwind something like this overnight. We are still dealing with certain aspect of the campaign that inevitably trickle into the next calendar year. We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Pretty soon we will be able to take some time and think critically about the future. As of now, I am not too focused on the next thing. I want to make sure that the next thing is the right thing and make sure that we continue building off what we accomplished in the past.
Charlie, thank you for taking the time this afternoon. We will certainly look to see what is in your future and the future of 11th Hour.
-Ty Christopher Olsen, April 16, 2024
