Club Med Boat Wins Round-The-World Race

March 3 -- Some 128 years after Jules Verne penned Around the World in Eighty Days, a giant Club Med-sponsored catamaran today wrote the book on how to sail around the globe in just 62 days.

The blue boat today won "The Race," the longest yachting competition ever.

After a near flawless performance, Club Med's Grant Dalton and Franck Proffit became the first skippers to win The Race, making nautical history when they crossed the finish line Saturday evening.

The previous record for sailing around the globe was 71 days.

"Our initial plan was to try and get ahead in the Atlantic, hold it through the Southern Ocean and try to maintain it coming home. And that's exactly what happened," Dalton said Friday.

Battle Between Man and Nature

It was a battle between man and his environment — fought with the fastest sailboats ever made — maxi-catamarans, which are up to 120 feet long and can cut through the waves at 45 mph.

The crew has shivered in the Southern Ocean, navigating around icebergs in Antarctica, and farther north, baked in equatorial heat waves.

They improvised their way around the planet. For example, they bathed whenever their sails captured enough water.

But in recent days, they also had to fight something else — their hunger.

"Some of the guys have actually lost quite a lot of weight," Dalton said. Some have reportedly lost as much as 25 pounds.

"During the middle part of the event we needed a little more food — in the Southern Ocean and the earlier part of the Atlantic coming back up," he said.

Americans, Poles, Brits Behind

Dalton and his crew had the competition virtually locked up days before today's finish. Frenchman Loick Peyron's Innovation Explorer was in second place — over a thousand miles behind Club Med.

The American-skippered boat Team Adventure was in third place, but it is a full ocean away — having only successfully rounded Cape Horn at the tip of South America on Wednesday.

In late January, off the coast of Africa, a huge wave smashed their boat. Two men were injured, one with a broken vertebra. Two others quit, fearing for their lives, and the boat was forced to spend nearly a week in port.

Team Adventure will have to sail across the length of the Atlantic before it nears the finish line.

But it doesn't seem to have totally crippled the boat. When skipper Cam Lewis' Team Adventure finally set sail after its delay, it was in fourth, behind the the Polish team of Warta Polpharma.

A month later though, skipper Roman Paszke's boat has fallen to fourth place and faces an even more desperate situation, with the threat of hurricane-force winds looming before it even passes the Cape.

Hopes were slimmest of all for Englishman Tony Bullimore's Team Legato, whose boat has consistently been in last place.

Last month, four crew members walked out in New Zealand. Bullimore's boat and his crew of now six is only halfway across the Pacific, days away from Cape Horn, and 9,000 miles off the lead.