Yachting: Cat skipper may need nine lives

By Suzanne McFadden

Grant Dalton will attempt to sail non-stop around the globe in a monster 38m catamaran he believes could be the fastest boat ever built.

It is the latest adventure for the tough Kiwi sailor, who has never sailed a multihull bigger than a tiny Paper Tiger.

Dalton will skipper the Club Med boat in The Race, the circumnavigation event starting on New Year's Eve, 2000.

He has already sailed around the world five times, but with comfort stops along the way.

His next sea voyage will be in the single-masted cat, being built in the Multiplast yard in Vannes, near La Rochelle, France. The boat costs around $NZ9 million, and is likely to fly the French flag.

The boat will be launched in April, when it will begin a series of record attempts to break the boat in.

Right now the world 24-hour record stands at 540 miles, set by fellow Race entry Playstation off New Zealand last summer. But Dalton believes that his boat could break 700 miles.

"I'd like to bring it to New Zealand and have a go at the Auckland-Russell record. I think we could do it in three-and-a-half hours," he said.

"We could get to Sydney in less than two days. This is a serious piece of kit."

Dalton has never sailed on a huge multihull before. "I know very little about them, and there's not a lot of time between now and the beginning of The Race," he said.

"But in the end the wind still blows and you've got to point the thing in the right direction."

There is one major difference from the monohulls he is used to sailing - pure speed.

"If this crashes it will crash in a serious way," he said. "But you don't always want to go fast. It could come down to the last man standing - a classic hare and tortoise race."

The boat will need 14 crew, but the only other yachtie chosen so far is Dalton's right-hand-man in the last two Whitbread's, navigator Mike Quilter.

The Club Med boat has been created by Frenchman Gilles Ollier, who designed Explorer, the first multihull to sail around the world in less than 80 days.

The race starts in Barcelona and wends through the Straits of Gibraltar around the bottom of South Africa and Australia. It could yet pass through Cook Strait, before going around Cape Horn and finishing in Marseilles.

At this stage there are seven boats lining up. Dalton sees his major competition as Playstation, now waiting to cross the Atlantic, and Englishman Pete Goss' 115ft wave-piercing catamaran.

"We are going to spend a month in France and sail down to Spain just learning to get it off the dock. Just trying to handle this thing is going to be an adventure," he said.

One of the records he wants to attempt is the retracing of Christopher Columbus' path from Spain to San Salvador.

Then there's the one that Dalton has dreamed about since he was a kid - the transatlantic crossing.

Dalton admits it has been a long and bumpy road just getting this far. He made his first presentation to sponsors in 1994. Just as he was about to flag the whole thing away a few months ago, race organiser Bruno Peyron made the first contact with sponsors Club Med.

Dalton hasn't given up on a campaign for the Volvo Ocean Race (the successor of the Whitbread). The Race will finish in March 2001 and the Volvo begins in September.

"I'm working flat out on both," he said. "I don't know whether I will sail in the Volvo but I want to have a campaign."

Dalton is also busy trying to put weight on. He was down to 80kg when he ran in the London Marathon earlier this year, but wants to be back up to 93kg.