Team Adventure drifts out of Cape Town in the The Race

by Keith Taylor on 28 Jan 2001 The American catamaran Team
Adventure resumed racing at 1:00 PM local time (11:00 GMT) at the entrance
to South Africa's Cape Town harbor. She didn't go far though. Virtually
becalmed under the lee of Table Mountain, her frustrated crew worked hard to
hook into little zephyrs of wind in their fight to get south.

'Well, we got out of jail,' said skipper Cam Lewis, in a reference to the
boat's enforced four and a half-day stopover in Cape Town to repair her
damaged main crossbeam. 'Now we are drifting some and sailing some. Right
now we are heading for Marseilles via the short direction. We need to get
turned around.'

Speaking via a satellite telephone, Lewis and his partner, co-navigator
Larry Rosenfeld said they had only covered five and a half miles, after
restarting The Race and hour and a half earlier.

Team Adventure is now racing with only ten crew after two hurt crew members
were prevented by their injuries from rejoining the boat and two other
crewmen opted not to continue on the epic adventure.

While Team Adventure was drifting under cloudless skies on a hot, sunny day,
her crew knew they had some tough sailing ahead. Out of the wind shadow of
Table Mountain, the southeasterlies were blowing at 35 knots. Cape Point, 35
miles down the course, was reporting winds of 55 to 65 knots and big,
confused wind-driven seas.

'It's not going to be easy,' said Lewis. 'We will have to claw our way south
on port tack, with two reefs in the main and the staysail. We'll be punching
straight into it. Once we get clear of the Cape of Good Hope, we have to
work our way through a band of light air. Our forecasters have cautioned us
that there is a deep low-pressure area advancing east. We need to get on the
right side of the low and get east in a hurry.'

Giving added emphasis to Lewis' words, her sisterships, the lead boat Club
Med and the second boat, Innovation Explorer yesterday logged 24-hour
passages of 599.2 miles and 584.5 miles respectively. These are the fastest
times each boat has recorded during The Race. At the 10:30 AM GMT position
report, Club Med was 3,000 miles ahead of Team Adventure. Innovation
Explorer was 600 miles behind Club Med.

Team Adventure got off the dock this morning at 9:30 AM local time as her
team of composite construction experts was still removing the last of their
equipment from the interior of the repaired crossbeam. The boat took 20
guests sailing on Table Bay, including the building crew, media and local
supporters. They hooked into a localized band of fresh breeze and hit 35
knots boat speed in flat water before offloading the visitors and officially
restarting.

After leading at the beginning of The Race and later in the South Atlantic,
Team Adventure was in second place at the time the accident happened. She
was following her sistership Club Med, commanded by New Zealander Grant
Dalton.

After starting in Barcelona, Spain, on December 31, the Race will finish in
the French Mediterranean port of Marseilles in early March.

Team Adventure is a partner in a pair of innovative web sites.
www.nationalgeographic.com/teamrace, the web site of the National Geographic
Society, is the educational partner in the collaborative venture. The
National Public Radio affiliates WBUR in Boston, MA, at www.WBUR.org, and
WRNI in Providence, RI, at www.wrni.org, are the exclusive radio media
partners.

Monster(.com, the leading global online careers site and the flagship brand
of TMP Worldwide (NASDAQ: 'TMPW'; ASX: 'TMP'), has signed a Sponsor Level
Partnership - becoming the first major sponsor of the team.