There are clues to Pete Goss’s racing history in the details of Oddity. The twin rudders and daggerboards are reminiscent of his Open 50 Aqua Quorum, which he raced round the world in the 1996/97 Vendée Globe.
The bowsprit and flying Code O make one think of the little Seacart catamaran he and Paul Larsen raced round Britain and Ireland in 2006. The hull chine has the vibe of the Class 40 he sailed in the Route du Rhum in 2010. Its long keel and traditional look are very much part of the history too, because Chris Rees designed and built Spirit of Mystery, a 37ft replica of a Mounts Bay lugger, for Pete and a crew to sail from Cornwall to Australia in 2008.
Pete and Tracey Goss were always jointly committed to these exploits. They first met as youngsters at Torpoint Mosquito Sailing Club near Plymouth, when Pete needed a crew for his Mirror dinghy. After school, Pete worked on a salvage tug, then joined the Royal Marines. On a bus one night he bumped into Tracey again. She was about to turn 21, and when Pete discovered she had no special plans to celebrate, he invited her out.
The couple have been married for over 35 years, and have two adult sons, a daughter, and now a toddler granddaughter. Pete stayed in the Marines for nine years. “I never thought of it as a career,” he says. “I ended up as an instructor in the sailing centre just when it became a profession. But when I left the Marines with no qualifications it was a job. I had to make a living.”
He wanted to be an ocean race skipper, and Tracey was up for PA that. “We had to sell our house and we both threw everything into it,” he says. In 1988, Pete raced a 26ft catamaran, Cornish Meadow, in the Carlsberg Single-Handed Transatlantic Race. In 1990 he was taken on by Chay Blyth as a training skipper for the British Steel Challenge, a hugely ambitious westabout round the world race for amateurs. Pete raced as skipper of Hofbräu Lager, finishing 3rd.
Since then his projects have been on both a huge scale and also very small. He is still, rightly, most famous (and revered in France) for his Vendée Globe in the 50ft Aqua Quorum, when he battled upwind in the Southern Ocean to rescue fellow competitor Raphael Dinelli from his upturned hull. Goss returned to a hero’s welcome and was awarded the French Légion d’Honneur medal.
This led on to a much bigger and even more daring sailing project, but one that did not end well. In 2000 he built Team Philips, a giant 120ft catamaran, on the banks of the River Dart in Devon for a new non-stop round the world race, The Race. Its wave-piercing hulls and twin rotating rigs were to be revolutionary, and in many ways it was ahead of its time, but the
