Maine sailor takes on Phileas Fogg> ’79 Days’ presents modern-day version of Jules Verne classic

AROUND THE WORLD IN SEVENTY-NINE DAYS, by Cam Lewis and Michael Levitt, Dell Publishing, 1996, 316 pages, $12.95.

Adventure books tend to run the predictable scenario. They came, they competed, they conquered. This book is different, very different. They sailed in an around-the-world race, they darn near drowned several times, and they won! Unfortunately, the title does not add to the suspense.

Cam Lewis, a self-described “Peter Pan,” is 35 in 1993, the year of the voyage. Born of well-to-do folks in Massachusetts and related to everyone from Adm. Byrd to early Commonwealth governors, he makes a living sailing. He has crewed professionally in everything from America’s Cup to dual-handed dashes across the Atlantic in multihulls. To keep your interest, he also has a girlfriend named Molly, who is a drop-dead-gorgeous professional model. (They’ve since married and live with their two children in Lincolnville.) In spite of all that, Lewis is a beguiling and likable character who adroitly brings us along on a wild ride with the help of writer Michael Levitt.

Over the years Lewis has cultivated some wild friends and has become one of the most accomplished American multihull sailors. (It seems that most of our sailboat racing is done in monohulls in this country.) Many of these wild friends were French. Apparently the French are rabid sailboat racers and equally rabid multihull disciples. That is how one crazy American found himself accompanying, and cooking for, four crazy Frenchmen as they raced a catamaran around the world trying to beat the mythical Phileas Fogg’s time, immortalized in Jules Verne’s 1873 novel “Around the World in Eighty Days.” (There was purportedly an official race with two other competitors, but one of them left early, making it more of an around-the-world free-for-all.)

To accomplish that feat, they have to average 14 knots an hour for the entire trip. They are undertaking this voyage in the Commodore Explorer. (Remember Commodore computers?) The Commodore Explorer is 86 feet long and 45 wide. From afar it looks like two long plastic culverts welded together by two crosspieces. Up close, the observer could see that the top of the culverts has been flattened and a couple of bubbles added to allow the crew to seek shelter. (As a test of your seamanship, try parking that sucker in Bucks Harbor on a July evening.) Anyway, part of the excitement in the book is that big does not always mean sturdy.

This book is more than a tale of a race. To those of us whose idea of full-bore sailing is a heady 5 knots, (and only then with the wind solidly aft the beam) interest in this kind of racing is an acquired taste. The book then becomes an object unto itself. Now that my old English teacher, Miss Rider, has either passed on to her reward or moved several states too far away to read this, I can admit that my sole prior exposure to Jules Verne was confined to the movie or the Classic Comic.

If you are unlucky to have missed both of those, you are saved. In a clever piece of work, we alternate chapters between the Commodore Explorer and Phileas Fogg’s quest to circle the globe in 80 days. We are able to compare each group’s progress as the days and hours tick away. For the price of a good sailing yarn we are also getting enough of the Verne classic so that we could say with only a barely discernible quiver that “yes, Miss Rider, I read the whole book!” But that is not all.

Scattered throughout the book are wonderfully painless explanations on everything from what Greenwich mean time is to what latitude and longitude are, and even why the toilets flush in a clockwise direction south of the equator. There is even a very thorough index for those of us who want to find something we read previously but can’t for our lives remember where it was.