Race sailing is supposed to be glamorous: handsome, muscular men hauling down mainsails, then evenings sipping long glasses of rum on the deckchair, watching the sunset over Singapore harbour, the gentle sound of the flapping sails as the warm south westerlies blow past.
To shatter the illusions, just take a peek into the underbelly of Team Ireland's boat in the Volvo Ocean Race. The Green Dragon is a lot of things, but luxury it ain't.
"Ten men in a wet cave for nine months," is how skipper Ian Walker describes it.
These guys have no room to move. They sleep, live and breathe on top of each other during the long legs when the boat is sailing.
The sleeping quarters are small and claustrophobic. Navigator Ian Moore and the media guy, Guo Chuan from Beijing, sleep and eat where they sit most of the day looking into their screens.
They sleep for four hours, then stay awake for four hours, in the same clothes (to save weight), for 40 days at a time.
"Your four hours' sleep never really lasts four hours," Phil Harmer, another crewman, explains. "More like an hour-and-a-half. When you get to shore you sleep for 24 hours solid."
If the wind changes they have to move the weight to the windward side of the boat, tonnes of stuff to be man-hauled in a hurry.
Hurry is the word. They are going to cover 13,000 kilometres and seven oceans. And hopefully beat the seven other boats in the race. They have four toothbrushes, with the handles cut in half, between the lot of them. Every ounce in weight that is saved can be the difference between winning and losing.
Ireland has already won something from this race already. A slice of the action comes to Galway on 23 May. The boats will race from Boston to Galway, then an exciting race will be held in Galway Bay on 30 May, a two-hour sprint compared with the huge legs of the ocean race. After another week of festivities, the boats depart for Marstrand in Sweden on 6 June.
The whole event will be two weeks of festivities, with hundreds of thousands of visitors flooding in to the city to see the boats and celebrate a centuries old link between our westernmost city and the sea.
The race should be cooking up to a nice climax by then, as the race is due to end in St Petersburg three weeks later. Hopefully the Irish team will all still be talking to each other after their nine months living at close quarters in the wet cave.
The boats are an awesome sight, tilting with the wind as they drag along the surface. Races are won and lost on a decision when to turn into the wind. Go a hundred metres too far and you could lose four places. Hold your nerve and you could win by a mile or come last. It is like watching racing cars whip around Mondello with everyone deciding by themselves when to turn. And there is always the chance of a crash.
Okay, it's not supposed to be part of the race but it is what everyone talks about afterwards.
As if in slow motion, the Team Russia boat, (skippered by an Irish sailor, Ger O'Rourke) turned just that little bit too tight and crashed. It left a small but dangerous hole on one boat, water spewing in chaotically and people shouting instructions at each other.
More spectacularly, Team Russia then smashed in to the committee boat - what a way to impress the judges.
One minute the blazered officials were lined up, keeping an eye on things, the next they were spilled in all directions.
A woman sunbathing on the back of the Committee Boat was thrown a few feet along the deck and had to hang on for dear life to avoid going overboard.
It was a reminder that this is sport where entertainment, spectacle and danger never steer too far away form each other, high drama somewhere between Johnny Depp and Lewis Hamilton being played out at full pace before my eyes.
Go to Galway and see for yourself.
Eoghan Corry
