SAILING:Kerry sailor Damian Foxall has clocked over half a millionmiles at sea and raced around the world eight times. There's more to come

HE SPEAKS a different language. Halyards. Crash-gybes. Forestay. Canting keel. He lives a different life. Derrynane. Lorient. Antartica, Antigua. Baltimore. Damian Foxall also thinks, you guess, with a different mindset.

He is the man at the wheel in the shades with the spray in his face. He’s the frowning ocean goer, the off-shore racer in the trough of a wave, a mountain of gathering southern ocean behind and in front.

In a sport that is one part Nasa technology and the other pioneering spirit, brawn and endurance, Foxall sits at the top table. Years on the water have beaten him into a salty shape of potato-bag knots of muscle under an ingrained wind-assisted tan. It’s what you cannot see is where the cold toughness shines through.

Today, away from his Breton home in Lorient, Foxall is mildly suspicious of the furore around him, the photographer, the dictaphones, the interviews as he fussily makes little of his growing achievements.

He has clocked over half a million miles at sea and has raced around the world eight times. In 2004 he sailed around the globe on the Steve Fossett boat Cheyenne – a beautiful, spare behemoth of carbon fibre, sail and rigging – faster than anyone had gone before.

Foxall won the inaugural Barcelona World Race with Jean-Pierre Dick three years ago; a non-stop, round-the-world belt for crews of two. Following the Clipper route his boat Paprec-Virbac 2 came back in 92 days.

Squat and lean from cycling to work for the past three years the next edition of the Volvo Round the World race later this month seems almost bread and butter.

The Irish NCB entry in 1989 and Green Dragon, which Foxall was on two years ago, were disappointments, both faltering in design, which ensured their race was run before a sail was hoisted. This year he will crew the Groupama boat under the breathlessly-revered French captain, Franck Cammas.

“The Volvo requires two years leading up to the start and all the choices we have been making over that last two years have been for this race,” he says clicking into a type of compute mode.

“Part of our success has already been decided by the work we’ve done. That would be the same for any sport. An Olympian is only an Olympian through his training, years of training maybe for a 100 metre sprint.”

Unflinching, intelligent, pragmatic, self-contained, the Volvo is not new to the Derrynane boy but the challenge is. Nine months of his life racing, breaking the boat up, fixing it, racing it harder. At the end it will have cut through 33,000 miles of water. But his windswept existence is less a job than a life, nothing less.

“I’m one of the luckiest guys in the world,” he says. “Since I left school it’s always been clear what direction to take. I’m as excited by the sport now as I was as a 14-year-old looking down the harbour and seeing someone out windsurfing on a fantastic day and just getting that urge of I’ve got to drop everything, drop everything right now and get down there.”

Married with two children, Naomh and Oisín, Foxall knows that despite the rush-of-life appeal of the sport and its vast dimensions danger is also part of the agreement. Experience tells him so but he uses it, he says, to learn from and not to feel every time Cape Horn looms into view. But fear has shaken his hand.

He has fallen over board only to be picked up by a boat that was coincidentally taking the same course. In five-metre waves 1,200 miles from land, Dutch friend Hans Horrevoets was tragically washed overboard from ABN AMRO Two during the last Volvo race.

Foxall knows fear. In November 2005 he and his partner Armel Le Cléac’h were competing in the Jacques Favre race. Just two of them were crewing the boat. They were in the Bay of Biscay. It was the middle of the night.

“We were sailing a 60-foot Trimaran, very large boat, very fast with huge speed potential, 30-35 knots,” he says. “We were approaching a cold front, which was coming in the middle of the Bay of Biscay two days out from the start. The wind got up from 30 to 55 knots and took us by surprise even though we were expecting it. I’d just handed over to Armel and was stepping back down to the cockpit and the wind flipped us over. In less than 30, 40 seconds I found myself underneath the platform. He had been thrown totally free. I was trapped underneath the boat, compressed between the boom and the platform underneath the water.

“I knew I wasn’t going to make it to the hatch of the boat and started swimming towards the back of the boat. I found the net but it was still under water.

“Every time a wave came past, the dip in the wave allowed me to get some air through the net. I was squashed back under water again but it allowed me to swim out under the boat, under the life lines. That was the closest I’ve come to death and to be honest I was close.

“You lose all your bearings. You get that feeling that time almost takes on a different kind of dimension. It was one of those moments when you know the choices that you take are critical.

“You’d be stupid not to feel fear. It’s how you deal with it. When we’re on top of the rig with the sail up and we lose control of the boat, 30 knots down wind in big waves . . .”

In his just-released biography, Ocean Fever, Foxall describes an outdoor life in Kerry where the garden of his house reached down towards the sea and Derrynane Harbour. His connection with the water is instinctive and organic. It has always been there. He readily admits that with his permission it has taken over his life. For that he has been amply rewarded, very often by globe-straddling millionaires and billionaires with fast boats.

Unquestionably he is one of the best in the world.

He was racing when his first child Oisín was born but “got back to take him out of hospital”.

His wife Suzy-Ann, a French-speaking Canadian from Quebec, has settled well in Brittany but Foxall admits the dynamics of his life have changed from his earlier days. He wants his children to speak three or four languages. They are growing up bilingually with French and English and he sees Spanish and Gaelic coming into their lives. He says that with his wife Suzy-Ann, they have “had conversations”, and that she does not approve all the time.

“It’s a very hard balance to strike,” he admits. “I’m lucky to do what I do and be able to support them. I think at some stage there has to be a levelling of the playing field.”

He is not complacent and he has learned that luck and accidents happen no matter what. The death of his Dutch friend was an accident; his boat flipping over in the middle of the night was an accident. No one was to blame.

“There are a lot of nightmare scenarios,” he concedes. “We sail inside the boat with bunks at the side of the hull and beneath them a significant amount of material is stacked – food, spares, hundreds of kilos of bags. When a boat turned upside down in the Whitbread there was a guy sleeping in one of those bunks up against the deck head. When the boat went upside down all the equipment that was below him was now above him and he was pinned into his bunk . . . with water pouring into the boat. But we do go out very well prepared.”

Foxall sees privilege too, going to parts of the world that very few people have ever been. In his book he talks of one of the most isolated inhabited places on the planet like Tristan da Cunha, a volcanic archipelago in the southern Atlantic with 275 people from 80 families and just eight surnames.

But more than the sightseeing, it’s the racing pure and simple, taking the boat to breaking point, sometimes beyond. Almost feral living and competing in the extreme under withering conditions may not seem alluring. And what enjoyment is there in sodden discomfort or being parched for endless weeks.

“When it comes down to it it’s still a race,” he says. “It’s to see who’s going to come first and whose going to come last. The attraction of it, apart from the competition, is to go to parts of the world that human beings aren’t really supposed to go to, the Southern Ocean, down around Antarctica and sub-Antarctica

“But we are there to go fast. The transatlantic is traditionally a rough leg and its down wind where you put up maximum sail. You’re carrying maximum sail area and the boat sometimes, is under limited control and if your not then you are not sailing the boat hard enough.”

These days technology is the boundary. Materials control how big and how fast the boats can be. Foxhall sees a move towards foils, designs that are more out of the water than in the water and as much aeroplane as yacht.

In a pre-Volvo race some years ago he made a transatlantic crossing where the boat was trying to break the ocean in eight or nine days. The record now is less than four days held by a French catamaran. “In the future we will see foilers racing around the world,” he says with confidence. “Records are going to come down.”

The Volvo race starts in 11 days. Alicante to Cape Town over 6,500 miles of Atlantic. Then its four oceans, five continents, severe sleep deprivation, hunger, temperatures of minus 15 and plus 40 degrees.

Foxall’s eyes light up.