The PUMA Ocean Racing team, skippered by Ken Read of Newport, has spent more than $22 million in Rhode Island over the last four years and is in the process of spending millions more on a new sailboat.
A Portsmouth company, New England Boatworks Inc., is currently building a boat that the team will race in the Volvo Ocean Race 2011-2012 later this year, Read said, describing the Volvo Open 70 vessel as an “extremely high-speed, mono-hull sailboat built for one reason only: to win world races.” He declined to say how much the boat will cost, noting only that the price is in “the millions” of dollars.
PUMA, a sports-lifestyle company based in Germany, has spent more than $22 million since early 2007 in direct support of its race teams and related activities, Read said, including the current team of 43 members based on Aquidneck Island. Only about 30 percent of that sum was spent in Newport, Read said, with the rest expended throughout the state. This figure does not include indirect expenses, such as local spending by team members.
Tom Rich, a principal of New England Boatworks who also is president of the Rhode Island Marine Association, said winning the contract for the PUMA boat is a “feather in the cap” of his company, as well as showcasing “what can be done in Rhode Island.”
Like Read, he declined to specify the boat’s cost, but Rich said it will take “a significant number of man hours” to construct the vessel, which was started in August and is scheduled for delivery in April. “This is huge, not only for New England Boatworks, but for Rhode Island,” Rich said. “It puts a lot of people back to work or keeps them working.” New England Boatworks employs about 100 people, Rich said.
Rich and Read noted that the mast, spars and all other key components also are being built by Rhode Island companies, including Hall Spars and Rigging in Bristol, although the design work was done by Juan Yacht Design, a naval architecture firm based in Valencia, Spain. “His designs have won the last two Volvo races,” Read said of owner Juan Kouyoumdjian.
“I’d like to say to state leadership that, ‘You guys have no idea of what you’ve got here,’ ” said Read, referring to the marine industry and other key assets such as state-owned Fort Adams that make Newport an ideal place to host worldwide sailing races, like the Volvo Ocean Race or America’s Cup.
His brother, Brad Read, executive director of Sail Newport, led the failed effort in 2009 to bring the 2011-12 Volvo race to Newport as the North American stopover, an event that could have generated $82 million locally, but will be held in Miami.
Working with an 11-member crew, Ken Read will be the skipper of the new PUMA boat for this year’s Volvo race, the only North American entry among eight expected. The race covers 39,000 miles around the world, starting in Spain, stopping at eight international sites along the way, including Miami and ending in Galway, Ireland.
Read skippered the PUMA entry for the last Volvo race in 2009, coming in second. “I’d never been happy with a second-place before, but I was thrilled. It was a good finish for a brand new team,” he said, referring to the fact that the PUMA team was created only 18 months before the 2009 race. The Seekonk native also has skippered three America’s Cup entrants. •
