Pete Goss captivates his audience (From Boating Cornwall)

Pete Goss captivates his audience

8:53am Friday 12th March 2010 in

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There aren’t many after-dinner speakers who can totally captivate their audience but that’s what happened when Pete Goss got to his feet at a special charity event at the Rose-in-Vale Hotel in Mithian.

The single-handed round the world yachtsman used slides and video to illustrate a talk that ran effortlessly from details of his first transatlantic race to the famous Vendee Globe storm that saw him rescue fellow competitor Raphael Dinelli against all the odds, the giant Team Phillips catamaran that sadly sank and finally to Spirit of Mystery, a 37 foot wooden replica lugger that he and his crew sailed to Melbourne, Australia, last year.

He described the monster southern ocean storm that nearly killed both him and Dinelli as ‘quite hairy’, before going on to explain that ‘if someone is in trouble you help them’ — even when doing so meant sailing 160 miles in the face of hurricane force conditions. The rescue was, he said, ‘a triumph of communications and teamwork’.

It was also little short of a miracle. Dinelli had watched his liferaft ‘blow away like tumbleweed’ but had managed to crawl into a second raft supplied by the Australian Navy. By the time, Pete Goss reached him and dragged him onboard to his own yacht, he was in a critical condition.

“You can see into someone’s soul through their eyes,” Goss told his audience, explaining that neither of them spoke the other’s language. They have since become firm friends, bonded by a selfless act of immense courage that resulted in Goss’s awards of an MBE by the Queen and the Legion d’Honneur by the French president.

Goss is a true adventurer but not, he told his audience, a risk-taker. “I do a lot of research and don’t take risks but I do embrace them,” he said. “Knowledge dispels fear.”

The event was organised to raise funds for Spirit of Mystery which in turn supports ‘Cornwall Playing for Success’ — an educational charity, supported by Pete Goss, that uses sport to improve young people’s learning and motivation in school.