It did hair-raising things to him: After two Atlantic races, a circumnavigation of the world with the BT Challenge as skipper and a Vendéé Globe Challenge, the break of Goss' The-Race-Kat "Team Philips" brought an end to the heat. The surviving Knight of the Legion of Honor from England had been declared insane and was for no one to speak to. He is now back with a particularly extreme project.
After his dramatic shipwreck in the North Atlantic in 2000, which kept an entire nation in suspense, Pete Goss was no longer seen in public. Instead, the ex-skipper marched to the North Pole, a broken man and almost anonymous. Goss made a brief interlude on a sailboat the year before last when he sailed a Seacart 30 trimaran in the Round Britain Race with the Australian Paul Larsen. Name of the Tris: "Cornwall Playing for Success". The "dangerous brothers" also wanted to take part in the 2007 Rolex Fastnet Race. But after the start they decided to approach the coast before a storm.
"Playing for Success" reveals what everyone already knows: that Goss is an extreme guy, not atypical for a former Royal Marine soldier (like Sir Chay Blyth, for example, is a former Royal Marine). Therefore, Goss' new ambitious project does not surprise anyone. Not even that a workboat from Cornwall was chosen for the trip. Apart from the fact that Goss is a decidedly well-informed local Cornwall patriot, the historic model of the trip also took place in 1854: A lugger, manned by seven Cornwall seekers, sailed from Newlyn to Australia, where the gold rush was currently raging. The "Mystery", the Lugger's name, only stopped once during the 11,800 mile journey - in Cape Town.
The "Cornwall Playing for Success" has been in Neustadt in Holstein for a few weeks. Although only 30 feet tall, the Marc Lombard design should easily be one of the fastest yachts in Germany. From the 2008 season onwards, the boat is to set records in domestic areas.
A crew of Formula 18 sailors led by owner Thomas Reinke, partner in the Kat specialty store Sport Mohr, sailed the boat across the wintry North Sea - at Goss' suggestion. When it was handed over, Pete Goss's hands looked like a carpenter's. As if they were just eyeing a house. "Nah. I'm doing a project with a wooden boat right now. That's quite a lot of boat building. Oh, all the wood". Now we know that the "wooden boat project" is a replica or restoration of a local lugger that Goss intends to use to sail the Southern Ocean.
The German Arved Fuchs made a similar journey with the decked-up lifeboat "James Caird II". From Elephant Island in Antarctica, he sailed through the Southern Ocean to South Georgia to honor the rescue operation of the "Endurance" crew by Sir Ernest Shackleton almost a century ago.