A Giant Vessel Challenges Icy Waters

The icy Southern Ocean is among the most inhospitable spots on the planet. And Gino Morrelli is about to plunge into it on the world’s biggest racing catamaran.

In the churning waters that ring Antarctica like a barbed-wire necklace, Morrelli and 12 other crew members will encounter gale-force winds blasting frigid sea spray at fire-hose force. They’ll bundle up in cold-weather gear and strap on safety harnesses, preparing for swells as massive as boxcars stacked four high.

And if there’s a loud crack, you can bet all eyes on board will be on Morrelli, co-designer of the 125-foot PlayStation, which will be trying to win a nonstop race around the world.

In the $2-million Race of the Millennium, six maxi-catamarans will leave Barcelona, Spain, on New Year’s Eve and hope to beat the rest of the fleet to Marseilles, France, about 70 days and 26,000 miles later. The route will go south past Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and then east around the bottom of the globe, keeping Antarctica to starboard.

For Morrelli, the adventure started five years ago. He and Pete Melvin, partners in an Orange County-based design company, were approached by a billionaire thrill-seeker who wanted to skipper the biggest, baddest sailboat ever.

The basic conundrum: How to build a gargantuan craft that could still be controlled by a crew?

No one had ever created a racing ship so large--the mainsail alone weighs nearly as much as a VW Bug--so much of the equipment had to be invented. The project was shrouded in secrecy to keep information from potential competitors, which is fitting for a boat made of the same high-tech carbon fiber used to build the Stealth bomber.

The finished product, a $5.5-million double-hulled craft, is 125 feet long by 60 feet wide, a platform about half the size of a hockey rink. With its 147-foot mast and maximum sail area of 11,600 square feet, PlayStation has reached speeds of nearly 40 knots (46 mph). If sewn together, the sails--which are nearly 25% larger than any competitors’--would roughly cover the Dodger Stadium infield.

“It is awesome to be on a boat of that size,” said owner and skipper Steve Fossett, a Garden Grove-reared commodities trader who made four attempts to circle the world in balloons, has swum the English Channel and finished the Iditarod dog-sled race. “The first time out sailing on it, I was driving and I flew the hull just like you would on a Hobie Cat, except that it felt more like a freight train.”

To create such a powerful craft, Morrelli and Melvin spent hours poring over hundreds of old designs and sailing their dream boat in their minds. They crunched variables in computer programs, testing speed and strength.

Morrelli doodles with new designs late into most nights and regularly traipses through bookstores looking for ideas.

“You never stop looking around, because your next idea for a part may come from a Renault station wagon or somebody’s desk or doorknob,” he said.

Having the co-designer on board boosts the crew’s confidence. Nick Moloney, a professional sailor from Australia, marveled at how Morrelli monitored the boat’s structure during an Atlantic crossing last summer. He said Morrelli calmly took infrared readings as the boat launched off waves and fell 25 feet to the water.

“It’s an enormous crash and an amazing amount of water coming between the trampoline that separates the two hulls,” Moloney said. “I was in awe. I thought the whole package was going to explode around us, but Gino was quite confident in everything and would talk to us about where our limits were.

“I think it’s one of our greatest strengths to have a designer willing to put enough faith in his creation to come with us around the world.”

Morrelli, a tall, lanky 43-year-old, has raced his own designs most of his life.

“I’m out there with the boys at 2 a.m. when things are going wrong,” he said. “It’s not like I’m selling somebody something that I have very little attachment to.”

An Early Lesson in Respect for Power

PlayStation was launched in December 1998 at 105 feet long. It was relaunched last month after being extended by 20 feet in nine furious weeks of work. The longer hulls improve the boat’s ability to handle extreme conditions.

When the wind gets strong, PlayStation can become a runaway, a lesson the crew learned while trying to break the transatlantic record last December. Only four hours out of New York, a squall pushed the wind speed from a steady 25 knots to a dangerous 60-plus.

Before it hit, Morrelli, who was at the helm, directed crew members to reef--or take in--the sails. But that took longer than expected because the crew wasn’t familiar with the boat.

The storm hit with all of the sail still out, causing the speeding PlayStation to bury its bow in a wave and come nearly to a stop in the span of about 100 feet. Crewmen were thrown head over heels, and the boat stood on its nose.

“When the boat hit the wave,” Morrelli said, “the first 45 feet of the boat went underwater at a 45-degree angle and the guys who were at the mast base, trying to reef the mainsail, who are normally seven feet above the water, were looking at the water eyeball level.”

In the cockpit at the stern, Morrelli could see the rudders hanging useless, 20 feet above water.

If the boat had flipped, crewmen probably would have died and the boat probably would have been destroyed. But PlayStation steadied and came to rest upright.

Morrelli said it was just good luck; Fossett gave credit to Morrelli, who had managed to turn the boat downwind, reducing its speed, just before the squall hit.

The boat escaped with only minor damage, but the crew had to scrub its attempt to break the record. The harrowing experience forced a reassessment of how hard the ship could be sailed.

“Before that happened, we were just kind of saying, ‘Oh, this is a big fast boat; let’s go as fast as we can,’ ” said crew member David Scully, a boat builder from South Carolina. “After that, it was, ‘This is a big fast boat; let’s be very respectful of the kind of power it generates.’ ”

The mishap led Fossett to give up on plans for an attempt in early 2000 to win the Jules Verne Trophy, which goes to the round-the-world record-holder. But after adding ballast to the stern and refining crew procedures, PlayStation made three transatlantic trips, once finishing one day short of the record of six days 13 hours 3 minutes.

Risks Inherent in Racing Catamarans

The Race of the Millennium created a market for huge catamarans, considered the best weapon to attack long-distance races. Among PlayStation’s potential challengers are three 110-footers built especially for the race.

The list of contestants dropped to six this month when the crew of the 120-foot Team Philips abandoned its wave-damaged boat on a test run in the North Atlantic, 750 miles west of Ireland.

The craft is apparently still drifting out there; salvage efforts were abandoned.

Team Philips’ latest misfortune--one of the boat’s bows broke in March and the mast failed in October--reemphasizes the danger of racing huge catamarans. Critics have questioned the sanity of pushing them to the limits during an around-the-world race.

Monohull boats that typically race such courses can capsize and pop back up. The first flip for a giant catamaran would be the last and would threaten lives.

These double-hull boats are less durable, but they are about 40% faster than the quickest racing monohulls, which is why all the entrants in this round-the-world race settled on maxi-cats.

For safety, the hulls of the big boats are designed to be unsinkable and are outfitted with survival supplies for several weeks. Sailing tradition calls for competitors to aid opponents and a rescue boat will trail the fleet.

“Half the battle is not letting the boat get out of control,” Morrelli said. “Because these boats are so big and they have so much load and inertia, you can’t simply turn them off. It’s like a missile, to a certain extent. Once it’s loaded and fired, it’s hard to shut it off.”

Morrelli is confident that PlayStation can be reined in. It’s among the most tested of the boats expected to race, having traveled about 15,000 miles. Still, that’s only about half the distance around the world, and the boat has yet to encounter the tumultuous storms and hull-crippling icebergs of the southern latitudes.

A Broad Background in Multi-Hull Boats

Morrelli designed his first sailboat as a student at University High School in Irvine in the early 1970s. It was a 35-foot plywood trimaran built as a shop-class project.

Later, Morrelli spent three years in France, designing and racing 60- and 40-foot catamarans in the major leagues of multi-hull regattas. He was part of the team that designed Stars & Stripes, the catamaran that blew away a monohull from New Zealand to win the 1988 America’s Cup in San Diego.

A year later, he met Melvin on the professional circuit. Morrelli’s resume made him famous among France’s rabid sailing fans. His reputation, along with Melvin’s, attracted Fossett.

The relationship grew when Fossett bought Stars & Stripes, which had been designed for close-to-shore races such as the America’s Cup. Morrelli and Melvin helped him turn the 60-foot cat into a nearly unbeatable offshore racer that still holds the record for the Newport-to-Ensenada race.

In 1995, Fossett approached the partners about building the most extreme big boat ever.

“It was like a natural evolution,” Morrelli said. “ ‘Well, what are we going to do next?’ ”

He compares sailing the big boat to racing the world’s most powerful car--flooring it on straightaways and trying to “not kill yourself in the corners.”

A Grueling Run Ahead

The crew hopes to blast the great white-hulled monster around the world and reach the finish in less than 70 days. That would require averaging about 400 miles a day, well within the boat’s range. Progress of all the competitors can be monitored on the Internet at https://www.therace.org and https://www.quokka.com.

For the crew, it will be an intense experience, marked by four-hour watch shifts, four-hour standby shifts and four-hour breaks--for weeks on end.

The interior of the dual hulls, best described as dark drain pipes 7 feet tall, will provide the only break from the environment. That’s where the crew will take care of basic needs, including sleeping, when the ride is smooth enough, in padded berths.

It will be wet below decks because condensation on the walls of the carbon-fiber and aluminum hulls causes it to rain inside. The bill of fare will be dehydrated. “The popular description of our food is salty brown slurry,” Morrelli said.

The sailors will need to choke down at least 6,000 calories daily in the Southern Ocean, just another thing to worry about while fighting nausea, fatigue and fear.

“There’s no doubt that everybody is kind of scratching their head about what happens when you get a 125-foot boat on a great big wave and it starts surfing down the face,” crew member Scully said. “I should imagine we are going to have some nervous moments.”

Morrelli, who will be making his first Southern Ocean trip, doesn’t expect to get much solace from his more experienced crew mates.

“We’ve got four guys on board who have done previous around-the-world races,” he said, “so we’ve got enough horror stories on board to keep us awake at night.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Ambitious Voyage

Billionaire adventurer Steve Fossett plans to sail around Antarctica in his catamaran PlayStation, designed by Orange County’s Gino Morrelli and Pete Melvin. A look at the boat and the treacherous course of the upcoming Race of the Millennium: