DAY 16 - PlayStation Retires from The Race. Port Dagger Board Shattered. Ripped Clew on Mainsail
News - Monday, 01/15/2001, 3:48 AM GMT

Position	01/15/2001 3:48 AM GMT
1st	Club Med (Back in the lead, avg speed 9.6 knots)
2nd	Team Adventure (15 nm from the leader. Moving a little faster, avg speed 7.9 knots)
3rd	Innovation Explorer (169 nm from the leader. West and faster, avg speed 11.1 knots)
4th	Warta Polpharma (1579 nm from leader. Good progress south of the Equator, avg speed 13.0 knots)
5th	PlayStation (1695 nm from the leader. Retires from The Race. Port dagger board shattered. Sails Unreliable, avg speed 17.1 knots)
6th	Team Legato (2456 nm from the leader. Speeding into the Doldrums, avg speed 14.5 knots)

PlayStations Steve Fossett, after having a 3 foot rip in the mainsail at the first reef clew and then the port daggerboard breaking at the waterline in a collision with a submerged object on Saturday night, made the difficult decision to retire from The Race on Sunday morning.

"Today's repair of the first reef clew by Nick Maloney looks good, but then the second reef clew looks just like it is starting to fail. We are destined to be struggling with sail repairs for the rest of the way. We just aren't prepared to tackle the Southern Ocean. PlayStation then turned north towards Miami (3750 miles away) which they should reach in ten days. When PlayStation arrives she will be officially declared to have retired from The Race. In a further conversation with Mission Control this morning, Steve advised that all was well onboard and that they would arrive in Miami/Ft Lauderdale in 10-14 days time. The mood onboard is "one of disappointment, of course, but morale is pretty good, considering. We are still very confident in the boat and her structure - and in her tremendous speed and record-setting potential."

PlayStation was the first of the new generation of giant catamarans to be built and has sailed the most miles of all The Race fleet including three transatlantic crossings.

PlayStation was built over three years at Cookson Boats in New Zealand under great secrecy. In particular, Fossett wanted people to think it was bigger than the eventual length of 35m/110ft.

Designed by the Californian multihull specialists Morelli & Melvin who had designed Stars & Stripes, PlayStation was first sailed in January 1999. In the early workup in March 1999, the boat set a new 24-hour sailing record of 580.3 nautical miles off the coast on New Zealand.

Fossett will be sorely missed.

Club Med and Team Adventure cut straight through the Saint Helena high. Club Med started in the lead and has maintained it. Team Adventure is very close, 15 nm, not letting up the pressure. Innovation Explorer sailed a westerly course around the Saint Helena High. The leading three cats head south towards their meeting with the Southern Ocean.

Cam Lewis, on Team Adventure: "The important thing on today’s agenda is to get as far south as possible to latch onto the New Zealand Expressway," he said, referring to the strong winds to be found below 40 degrees south. He also challenged Fossett to a race across the Atlantic later this year, a mouth watering-prospect.

From the NOW live tracker, www.now.com

Innovation Explorer is in turqoise Club Med in yellow Team Adventure is green

PlayStation is in red Warta is orange Team Legato is blue

Warta Polpharma crossed the Equator at 0000 and covered 67 miles in 7 hours, in the Doldrums light airs.

From the NOW live tracker, www.now.com

Team Legato is currently SE of the island of Santiago, (Cape Verde Islands archipelago) progressing in a westerly direction.

Team Philips
Vicky Williams, speaking on behalf of Goss Challenges, announced: 'It is too early to say what action we will take. We don’t know why the beacon became active and we can’t just head off into the middle of the Atlantic. The boat may still be afloat because the structure was insubmersible, but she may have been smashed into a million pieces'.

When the Pete Goss and his team were rescued by the cargo ship the beacon was untriggered. The beacon might have triggered in contact with sea water.

Team Philips is now in the Atlantic, just under 1,000 miles off the coast of Britain. There are no plans as yet to recover the boat. 'I don’t think they will try anything', commented a spokesman from the British Coastguard, 'because the boat must have been badly damaged and the cost of a salvage operation would be too great'.

Pete Goss and Logistics Manager, Nick Booth, carried out an extensive aerial search for Team Philips on Sunday, 14 January 2001.

The team flew from Shannon, Ireland and covered an extensive area in the region where the signal was picked up by Falmouth Coastguard. Despite good visibility throughout the day, there were no sightings of the yacht.

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