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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Record Collector
You better grab a lifeline and hold on tight when Steve Fossett decides to make another manic bid for glory

By Tim Zimmermann


	(Illustration by David Hughes)

"LET'S GO: CODE GREEN," the e-mail reads. Multimillionaire Steve Fossett is out to break the east-west transatlantic sailing record, and the terse message is confirmation that I'll be going along for the ride. In today's world, color codes usually refer to terrorism threat levels. In Fossett's, they set the clock. Code Red means there's no decent weather window imminent. Code Yellow means something might be brewing five days out. Code Green means get your ass to the boat. This same e-mail is being read from Europe to California by a small cadre of elite sailors always eager to show their chops on PlayStation, Fossett's $5 million, 125-foot maxi-catamaran—arguably the world's fastest sailboat. I've raced enough to convince our 59-year-old skipper that I can crank winches and avoid mortal injury on a boat that can reach 45 miles per hour and where breakage can slice a man in two. With little more than a pair of seaboots, two pairs of socks, and a set of thermals, I scramble for the airport, headed for southern Spain.

Fossett's mammoth toy dominates the waterfront at the Puerto Sherry Marina, a vast yachting facility near C‡diz. PlayStation—designed by the Newport Beach, California, team of Gino Morrelli and Pete Melvin and launched in 1998—has been carving up European waters for more than a year, and has set five world speed records since October 2001, when it obliterated the mark from New York to the English Channel, in four days and 17 hours (a 2,925-mile sprint that lopped almost 44 hours off the prior time). Now Fossett wants to crown himself King of the Atlantic by claiming the record going the other way. The east-west course, a slower and warmer trade-wind run, traces the 3,884-mile route Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to the New World, making landfall at San Salvador, Bahamas. It took Columbus six weeks; we plan to sail it in ten days. There are only four other multihulls on the planet capable of such speed. In June 2000, one of them—the 110-foot Club Med—set the current Columbus Route record of ten days, 14 hours, and 53 minutes, a record Fossett plans to smash.

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Correspondent Tim Zimmermann is the author of The Race (2001).

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