Laying siege to the Guinness Book of Records

James Boyd talks to sailing's serial record breaker and looks back at the remarkable career of Steve Fossett

Last week Steve Fossett announced that he is selling PlayStation/ Cheyenne in order to focus on his numerous aviation projects, concluding what has been a remarkable decade-long siege on the WSSRC's catalogue of sailing records. It is a sorry loss for our sport.

"It has been a great run. I’ve had a fabulous time and done most of what I want to do," Fossett told thedailysail. "I don’t rule out doing more sailing either just for fun or even record attempts. The decision made now is that I am closing this records program and I am non-committal about whether I will be making any record attempts in the future. I am not making any promises I won’t sail again..."

In Plymouth when Cheyenne arrived in fresh from demolishing the non-stop around the world record and two weeks before Fossett's 60th birthday, there was much talk on the dock about whether or not the skipper would hang up his sea boots having royally achieved his ultimate amibition in sailing. "I wanted to think about it," says Fossett. "There are things for me to do in sailing, but I just wanted to consider the priorities relative to my aviation projects and after reviewing it I decided it was the right time to quit."

Throughout his career both professionally and as a sportsman/adventurer Fossett's story has been one of taking on challenges. What is remarkable is his endless appetite for these challenges and the degree of success with which he overcomes them.

Professionally Fossett made his fortune in the 1980s through his businesses Lakota Trading, a Chicago-based stock options trading firm and the New York Stock Exchange-listed Marathon Securities. In his youth he showed an aptitude for adventure and outdoor endeavour as opposed to more conventional field sports. He prefered mountain climbing to football and this distinction between adventurer versus sportsman he has carried through to later life. He admits that as a sailor he is more aligned with Peter Blake and Grant Dalton rather than Olympic sailors.

He doesn't profess to having great talent but there is clearly something in his approach whether it is his drive, his preparation, analysis or decision making - maybe a mixture of all these - that he relies on and is common to all his endeavours. "I think it carries over from my business career that I’ve organised and created a focus upon putting the effort together properly," says Fossett. "It obviously hasn’t been done entirely with luck. Sometimes we’ve had good weather and sometimes we haven’t. It has happened with proper organisation and leadership and with an outstanding crew of sailors. So in that regard I see myself as a skipper. I am not supposed to be the most talented. I am the skipper who has brought all this together."

He agrees that there are a lot of parallels to how he approached his business life and his endeavours outside of the office. "When I first came into sailing, I laid back. I thought the guys who had more experience would be able to make better decisions and after a while I realised there is no luck on a good decision, that I could make at least as good decisions as anyone else on the boat. So I listened to good advice, but the decisions are ultimately mine and I found that worked very well."

On his management style he says: "I allow my crew to operate to their full ability. I create the environment and I allow them to perform at their highest level. And this makes them happy. I also have great respect for my crew. I listen very carefully to their opinions and their ideas and then it is for me to synthesise all the best advice to come up with the best decision, whether it is a sail change or an overall strategy decision."

But this doesn't explain how he has proved so capable of handing such extreme personal endurance, an aspect of many of his records: As a mountaineer he has reached the summit of the highest mountains on six of the seven continents. In 1985, on his fourth attempt, he succeeded in swimming the English Channel. He has also competed in the Hawaii Ironman triathlon, involving a 2.4 mile ocean swim, 112 mile bike ride and a 26.2 mile run. He has raced 1,160 miles across Alaska in the Iditarod Dogsled race, twice driven the Le Mans 24 Hour race and has also competed in the Paris-Dakar rally and three times in the Daytona Race.

This test of personal endurance has continued through to his sailing. He was taught sailing by a combination of David Scully, Brian Thompson and Helena Darvelid and after just over a year in the sport he finished fifth in the 1994 Route du Rhum on board his 60ft trimaran Lakota, originally the 1990 winner of this event, Florence Arthaud's Pierre 1er. Aboard Lakota he subsequently went on to set other singlehanded records including the Transpac and the record eastwards across the Pacific from Yokohama to San Francisco.

Fossett's career in sailing has unashamedly focussed on records rather than races. "Records are more unique," he explains. "Only one person can be the fastest and hold the record, whereas races are repetitive, they may reoccur once every year or four years. I’ve always been fascinated with the unique achievement of a record and much less of a yacht racer." Yet his boats have been first to finish 21 events (he is not a handicap man).

As owner of Dennis Conner's softsail Stars & Stripes catamaran from the 1988 America's Cup, Fossett set many race course records on the west coast of the States or the lakes, including the Newport-Ensenada and Chicago-Mackinac. Since then Lakota has been sold to Richard Brisius and Johan Salen's company Atlant in Sweden and now sails in the Nokia Oops Cup, while Stars & Stripes has also been sold and rather disapppointingly is being converted into a tour boat, operating out of Fort Myers, Florida. "Of course that is good for me because Stars & Stripes is the only boat that is capable of breaking a couple of our race records," says Fossett.

Cheyenne, the first of the new generation G-Class multihulls to be built, which set a new 24 hour distance record of 580 miles on one of her first outings, that Fossett had extended from 105 to 125ft in 2000, that he has since set landmark records on the west to east transatlantic course and most recently non-stop around the world, is now up for sale too. For what can claim to be be the world's fastest offshore boat the price is a cool 2.5 million Euros. "The boat is a natural for the Oryx Cup," says Fossett. "Someone should buy it and enter it and if they do that they would be favoured to win."



Two great record breakers - Sir Robin Knox-Johnston with Steve Fossett

Fossett's retirement from sailing he says has nothing to do with the lack of sponsorship of his sailing program since his contract with PlayStation expired. "The handicap of being American is that there is no track record of sponsorship of distance sailing in America, whereas there are excellent results with sponsorship in France and England," he explains. "Sponsorship of [distance] sailing is almost impossible in the United States. I had though about that. I suppose I should have gone a year ago for the round the world record, but I was holding out to get sponsorship and we didn’t get it. And this year, I decided ‘well the round the world is so important that I ought to reach into my own pocket, pay for it and do it’."

From here Fossett's ambition lies in the skies adding to his already monumental list of achievements in balloons, planes and gliders that includes the first solo balloon flight around the world. "The very next thing that is up is that our season opens in June through to August in New Zealand to try to fly a glider up into the stratosphere," he says. The Perlan Project, a joint project with NASA will see Fossett attempt to take a glider to 60,000ft and then up to 100,000ft.

He also has an on-going program with speed and distance records in gliders. "Over the past two years I’ve set nine world records for speed and distance," he says. "So I’ll go back to Argentina in November and December to try for some different records."

Also to be ticked off in the next 12 months is his project to make the first non-stop solo airplane flight around the world aboard his Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. This is scheduled to take place between November and March.

Designed and built by Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites this extraordinary craft has a 114ft wingspan and a single engine jet. "What is unusual about it is that it has to have the ultimate in fuel efficency and fuel carrying capable. 82% of the total take-off weight is fuel. That has never been done before in aviation," says Fossett. The aircraft can carry more than four times its own weight in fuel - enough to power the specially designed Williams FJ44-3 jet engine for the entire flight. At take off the plane (including fuel and pilot Fossett) will weigh 22,006lbs. Less than 80 hours and some 23,000 miles later, it will have shed 18,000 lbs of fuel to land near its dry weight of a little under 4,000 lbs.

One problem with the plane is that the plane is so efficient that the team have recently been having to experiment with drogues to find ways to make it come down.

In the decade we have come across Steve Fossett we been unable to equate the presumably aggressive razor sharp former self, the titan of the Chicago options floor, with the mild mannered figure you meet in person, the former scout who during his youth earned the Eagle Scout Award, scouting's highest rank and who now sits on the Executive Board of the Boy Scouts of America. Maybe we'll give up trying and sit back and wait to read about the latest exploits of a man who will go down in history as one of the greatest ever adventurers.