Playstation out, Club Med leads from Team Adventure

by Keith Taylor on 15 Jan 2001 The see-saw battle for the lead in The
Race of the Millennium continued in the South Atlantic today as the big
French catamaran Club Med remained poised just in front of her American
rival Team Adventure. The 110-foot American catamaran, skippered by Cam
Lewis, from Lincolnville, ME, and her sistership, the French cat sailed by
New Zealander Grant Dalton, slowed dramatically overnight about 1,000 miles
east of the southernmost coast of Brazil.

'This is the race to get south,' Lewis commented today in a satellite email
from the boat. 'We are now coasting along in a huge high pressure zone with
the fleet compressing in behind us. This will be the gateway to the south
and for another 24 hours we will be working hard to maintain the best
possible speed in light and trying conditions. The first boat out into the
westerlies of the Roaring Forties will have a great chance to jump into a
nice lead on the eastbound expressway to the Indian Ocean.'

There are now only five boats in The Race. Last night the other American
boat, Steve Fossett's 125-foot Playstation retired and set a course for
Miami, FL, after tearing her mainsail and snapping off one of her twin
daggerboards. The fleet is racing non-stop around the world from Barcelona,
Spain to Marseilles, France. The boats, all catamarans 100-feet long or
longer, started the 27,000-mile race on New Year's Eve.

'Unfortunately, Playstation had some bad mogo,' Lewis said. 'The PlayStation
crew are great competitors and have a fantastic boat. They certainly put a
lot of effort into making the boat faster and safer. It's disappointing
that we don't have them racing beside us to the south.

There was an obvious concertina effect overnight as the two leading boats
slowed. Club Med was 35 miles closer to the finish than Team Adventure at
the 1:00 PM GMT position report today. Innovation Explorer, the third of the
three 110-foot Ollier-designed sisterships, had halved the gap to third
place, closing to within 115 miles of Team Adventure. The three boats were
spread out on an east-west axis with Club Med furthest east and Team
Adventure in the middle as they sought out the fastest way around the light
winds of the St Helena high-pressure zone.

'This morning we started a complete top to bottom check of our boat, from
the tip of the mast to the bilges,' Lewis said. 'This will be last good
opportunity to do many maintenance jobs and rig checks until we are back in
this area after crossing all the southern waters and passing Cape Horn to
finalize project 'Deep South' - 10,000 miles of high speed, high wind
sailing and the circumnavigation of the great Antarctic continent.

'We are changing our two steering compasses out for special southern
hemisphere-balanced ones. Northern hemisphere compasses will tilt
dramatically in the deep south as the magnetic pull will be felt straight
through the earth and not around the curve, tipping the card's compass rose
and sometimes jamming its rotation.'