Lewis skippers boat around globe Team Adventure third; Sailor hoping for shot at trans-Atlantic record

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Fired by books such as “Moby Dick” and “Around the World in 80 Days,” pirate tales and sailing magazines, and fueled by summers on the islands of Penobscot Bay, Cam Lewis dreamt about sailing as a child and became an actual, real-life high-seas adventurer as a grown-up.

Lewis returned recently from another trip around the world, another exciting – and in some ways disappointing – adventure. He participated in The Race, a non-stop circumnavigation contest that started Dec. 31 in Barcelona, Spain, and wrapped up in Marseilles, France, in March.

Despite skippering what he says is the world’s fastest sailboat, a 110-foot catamaran called Team Adventure, Lewis and his crew didn’t achieve their quest for a nonstop trip. They sailed into Marseilles in third place (the boat Club Med won).

But The Race has sparked another dream for the Lincolnville resident who grew up in Massachusetts but spent summers on the islands of North Haven and Vinalhaven.

“When I was a young kid and read a bunch of books and saw a bunch of pictures and I got an idea about the sea,” said Lewis, sitting in his airy, log cabin office in the woods overlooking Lake Megunticook, surrounded by items such as sailing posters with French lettering, a can of Spanish olives (con pimiento natural), and a binder of maritime law of the Marshall Islands.

“I always had an ambition to go out to sea and do something, whether it was sailing around the world or going to different foreign places.”

With the speedy catamaran, Lewis and his sailing partner Larry Rosenfeld believe they are capable of breaking the trans-Atlantic sailing record. It’ll take another crew and more money (Team Adventure raised about $6 million for The Race), but after their experience this winter, that dream could become a reality.

A team effort

Lewis has one of the more illustrious sailing resumes out there, which made him ideal to skipper a circumnavigation team.

The tall, tanned, 44-year-old tried out for the 1980 Olympic team, did a stint on the Dennis Connors-skippered America’s Cup winner Stars & Stripes in 1988, and held a crew position on a 1993 circumnavigation led by Bruno Peyron that broke Jules Verne’s 80-day record (the Peyron team circled in 60 days and 30 hours).

Lewis had the actual sailing experience. The rest of it – the fundraising, organizing, planning and being in charge – was new to him.

“I was the skipper. I was the big responsibility person. I had to put it all together and it’s a matter of building a team,” he said. “It was a slow start getting the funds raised and it’s certainly not an individual effort. Back [in 1980] I just did it all myself but this project was really about finding good people, getting a dream and then figuring about how to make a dream work and taking on the responsibility.”

Initially, that meant finding a partner with business sense, someone who could help with the money and fundraising part of the project. Lewis found that in Rosenfeld, whom he had met in 1975 at Hood Sailmakers, where Rosenfeld was a research director and Lewis was a high school intern. Rosenfeld was available to help, as he had just sold Concentra Corporation, a software company, to Oracle in 1998. Rosenfeld became Team Adventure’s executive director and co-navigator.

“It was really a joint effort,” Rosenfeld said recently from his home in Marblehead, Mass. “Cam’s a natural leader and he did a great job with everything.”

Fundraising was one of the tougher parts of the organizational process. It took plenty of convincing for companies to sponsor Team Adventure rather than popular sponsor-driven sports like NASCAR.

It came down to, Lewis said, to making people believe in “lunatic-fringe sailing.”

Thanks to the team’s fundraising hustle, Lewis was just short of the amount he wanted, but had enough to build a boat and put together a crew.

Lewis compiled a team of everyone from those who answered the phones to designers, engineers, sailmakers, boat builders, and equipment suppliers.

Randy Smyth, a two-time Olympic silver medalist in the Tornado catamaran class and Lewis’ shipmate on board the Stars & Stripes, was another longtime friend who jumped on board. Smyth served as the sail coordinator.

The crew on the boat included Americans, French and a Swede. The official language on board was English, but the Americans who didn’t speak French occasionally ran into trouble.

“When you’re on deck, as an example, to do a critical maneuver and it’s dark in the night and blowing hard and there’s one person who doesn’t understand what’s happening by language and it’s very hard to hear to begin with on these boats, the distance between people can get pretty big,” Lewis said. “I usually tried to redirect it to English when we were trying to do any maneuvers. I’ve been sailing on international boats for a while. I was comfortable but when I realized other people didn’t understand what was going on, that was a problem.”

The boat itself was completed 10 months before the start of race – an uncomfortably close finish. In fact, Rosenfeld said, Team Adventure got everything together a mere six hours before the final spot at the boat builder in France was taken.

“We were very lucky that everything came together when it did,” Rosenfeld said with a laugh.

The speedy catamaran was built to travel at more than 35 knots with a top speed of 40 knots.

With funding secure, a solid crew in place, and Lewis at the helm, Team Adventure was incredibly confident and set off Dec. 31 from Barcelona. But the boat’s capability of doing incredible speeds would catch up to Lewis and his team in a dangerous way.

Trouble in the South Atlantic

Leaving the Mediterranean and heading into the Atlantic, Team Adventure enjoyed a slight lead on the rest of the field and a team of ABC-TV reporters that had sailed as far as Gibraltar. The boat headed southwest to the Madeira Islands to pick up a cold front that the crew was hoping would push them south toward the equator.

But the front moved faster than they thought, erasing Team Adventure’s advantage. As the boats raced to the equator, Club Med snuck through and took the lead, which it held onto for good.

Still, Lewis and his boat hung in and sped up to close in on the two boats ahead. Lewis was climbing on deck one day in the last week of January when Team Adventure ran into trouble.

“We were definitely going too fast and we needed to slow down. There was a jerk. A good analogy is slamming on the breaks just for a second, hard,” he said. “We didn’t really stop dead. We stopped and kept going.”The front crossbeam that runs between the two bows had slammed into a wave. One of the crew on deck suffered serious whiplash. Another crewman below was throw forward and suffered a spine injury. And with the damage to the boat, it was clear there was going to have to be a stop in the non-stop race.

Team Adventure pulled over in Cape Town, South Africa, where Lewis and his crew stayed for fivedays. Two other crew members left at that point, Rosenfeld said, because they were scared after the accident. That stop, plus another in Wellington, New Zealand, to let off a crew member with a herniated disk in his back, pretty much sunk the effort. The accident and subsequent stop was, Lewis said, the heartbreak of the trip.

“There were discussions about not continuing when we were in Cape Town,” he said. “It would have been pretty simple to bring the boat home, and in Wellington, too, but there was no reason to quit. We had the boat built and part of the whole project was to get around the world and certainly as a model for our sponsors and students, quitting wasn’t going to get us anywhere.”

Lewis and his crew reached Marseilles on March 23 at 10:21 a.m. local time, 19 days after the Club Med boat. They had sailed 29,773 nautical miles at an average speed of 14.97 knots. The crew completed The Race in 82 days, 20 hours, 21 minutes and two seconds.

Lewis estimates 300 to 500 schools followed The Race and the trip back across the Atlantic. Team Adventure imitated the supposed route of Christopher Columbus from Gibraltar, past Cadiz and the Canary Islands, and finally to San Salvador, where Columbus was believed to have landed. The crew posted updates on its Web site and had two teachers along, and Lewis was pleased with the success of the educational end of the trip.

But there was still the sting of losing The Race.

“I’m definitely a competitive person and I had to live with the fact that after the accident winning was a real long shot,” he said. “The other two boats had to break down and for that to happen was unlikely. With the lead they could back off and be conservative once we were out. I’ve been racing all my life and certainly competing is fun. But winning is the real trick.”

The next record

Lewis returned to Maine at the end of April after leaving the catamaran at a boat yard in Savannah, Ga.. The cycle is starting over again now – the fundraising, getting a crew together and trying to complete a list of 117 repairs he wants to make to the boat, which traveled 40,000 miles in six months.

Lewis is trying to spend time with his sons, Max, 7, and Beau, 5. He’s working through a breakup with his wife, Molly. He’s getting back into running and biking and finding his land-legs again.

He has big plans for the summer. Lewis wants to bring the boat up the East Coast and for that the money will have to come in again. There are still records to be broken. Among them, the trans-Atlantic crossing mark.

To get the boat up and running, and properly outfitted, the team is looking for another $1 million. But it’s a breakable record, Lewis thinks, and a mark he wants to try for this summer. That might be enough to attract sponsors, he hopes.

Rosenfeld is eager to try. The two are convinced they can break the record because of the way Team Adventure has performed against other boats that have broken the record or have made attempts. Lewis, who set the mark for the reverse run from England to Rhode Island in 1994, came up just short of the record in a 60-footer a few years ago.

“As long as we wait for a good weather pattern, we have a great shot,” Rosenfeld said. “We’ve been on land long enough. It’s time to get back on the water.”

The record for a crossing between the Ambrose Light Tower off New York City to Lizard Point in Cornwall, England, is six days, 13 hours, three minutes and 32 seconds. The record was set 11 years ago by French skipper Serge Madec.

“In the sailing world it’s one of the most recognizable records and one of the most sought-after,” Lewis said.

Right now, the trans-Atlantic record is just another goal and a dream for Lewis. But for someone who modeled his life on the adventure stories he read as a child, anything seems possible.

“One nice thing about setting a goal, raising this money, is letting people know that you can fulfill your dreams. You can have a dream and achieve something if you work hard enough at it. There’s always luck involved, but don’t ever give up on your dreams. Find out what you want to do and tackle it whether you want to sail or climb up Mount Katahdin. It’s a big world. Turn the TV off sometimes and join the big world.”