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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Record Collector (Cont.)

"EASE! EASE!" Pete Melvin yells from the helm as a 44-knot gust rolls through. In less than 36 hours, we've sailed almost 700 miles to the Canary Islands, where Columbus made a four-week pit stop. The Canaries are famous for funneling wind into a raging torrent, and sure enough, the northerly breeze accelerates abruptly, pumping into the thirties. PlayStation takes off like a runaway train. She is hammering across the seas, vibrating, creaking, and slicing the wave tops into fusillades of spray.

We are moving at a speed ordinary sailors can't even comprehend. I'm frozen in place, mesmerized by the pure joy of sailing PlayStation flat out and the certain knowledge that if a steering cable breaks or the rudders lose their bite, our record bid will come to a violent end, with the boat upside down and people fighting for their lives. Fossett is down below, sleeping. He's off watch and has seen it all before.

In December 1999, Fossett almost flipped PlayStation end over end during an unsuccessful attempt to break the west-east transatlantic record. There are plenty of adrenaline junkies who would come away from such a close call secretly thrilled, but Fossett isn't one of them. "Statistically, he's got a fair chance of killing himself, and that doesn't bother him," Hogg says. "But he's not into it for the risks." Rather, Fossett's single greatest strength is his stoic ability to comprehend and manage risk—and that, more than anything else, is what he really loves.

With the Canaries behind us, Fossett puts aside his polite reserve for a moment as we sweep south toward Caribbean latitudes to stay in strong trade winds. He is still wearing his boots and a flotation harness but is down to shorts and a T-shirt in the tropical sun as he keeps an eye on the helmsman.

"The one thing I have done in life that I really have a natural talent for is options trading," he says. "I was probably the most profitable trader in Chicago, and five times more profitable than the best of up to 100 traders I hired. I don't gamble at all. I won't so much as put a nickel in a slot machine, because it's no fun when I know the odds are stacked against me. My whole trading experience was based on getting the odds in my favor."

And that's exactly how he executes his adventures. It took Fossett six tries to balloon solo around the world; in his fifth attempt, with only the South Atlantic crossing between him and success, he deliberately crashed in southern Brazil because he didn't like his chances of surviving the weather ahead. He climbed the highest peaks on six continents and then gave up on Everest after two attempts because he had trouble staying healthy at high altitude and he couldn't stand sitting around in camp. Fossett tells me he has felt truly close to death only once—in 1998, when his balloon ruptured at 29,000 feet over Australia's Coral Sea. And even as it plummeted from the sky, Fossett calmly kept doing what he does best: massaging the odds. He ran the burners to provide what little lift they could give and in the minute before impact cut away six external tanks to lighten the basket. Fossett estimates that this slowed his fall to the barely survivable velocity of 40 feet a second; though he was briefly knocked unconscious, he lived to climb into his life raft and await rescue. "The only reason I made it," he says, "is that I kept fighting to solve the problem."

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