He has sailed the Caribbean and crossed the North Atlantic at the helm of his own sailboat. He has sailed the seas off the coasts of Australia, New Zealand and Thailand, and he has participated in regattas in rough, open seas. But now, Meeno Schrader, 43, is experiencing the greatest adventure of his life -- in a nondescript office building in the northern German city of Kiel.

Schrader, a slender man with a dark tan and powerful hands, sits in a corner at a narrow table. The office walls are hidden behind ocean charts and weather maps, and with pieces of paper covered with long snakes of numbers showing barometric pressure and wind speed readings. Schrader is a meteorologist, a sort of weatherman for the sailing industry, and he is in the middle of a ten-week-long special project. Working as what in the sailing world is called a router, Schrader is currently directing a 75-foot trimaran -- which appears as a red dot on his computer screen -- down the coast of West Africa. The yacht is the triple-hulled B&Q Castorama, and it is on the first leg of its race around the globe.

Twenty eight-year-old Ellen MacArthur of Britain set sail almost three weeks ago to master the most difficult challenge in sailing: She plans to circumnavigate the globe alone, nonstop, and in record time. To beat the current record of 72 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes and 22 seconds, set one year ago by French solo sailor Francis Joyon, she will have to cross the starting and finish line between the southern tip of Cornwall and the French island of Ouessant by no later than 7:04 a.m. on February 9, 2005.

High-tech weather reports

Without the help of experts, who combine their specialized knowledge about wind, waves and sailing expertise, MacArthur wouldn't have a chance. Each day, Schrader calls up reams of up-to-the-minute weather data, runs it through his computer, and transforms the results into ultra-accurate weather forecasts. After checking with two other routers located in the United States, Schrader sends MacArthur an e-mail with his recommended course once every six hours. Schrader, who holds a doctorate in meteorology, says that the e-mail message must be brief, clear and unmistakable. "Ellen is flying across the waves in her boat. She's exhausted and tense, and the last thing she wants to be doing is reading lengthy prose." For emergencies, she has his mobile phone number.

The recipient of his e-mails, Ellen MacArthur, sits wedged in the narrow cockpit of her trimaran, jammed between a sleeping cot and the vessel's desalinization system, facing instruments and a satellite telephone, all within easy reach. Economizing on weight and space is key -- nothing superfluous can be allowed on board the vessel. "You don't need a shower to survive," says Ellen MacArthur, "after all, there's nobody with you to tell you that you stink."

MacArthur does, occasionally, get to leave her cramped cabin in the stern of the boat, but it's hardly something she can look forward to. In all kinds of weather sails need to be changed and repairs must be made. Just how brutal the battle with the forces of nature can be became clear four years ago, when this petite 5'3" woman circumnavigated the globe during the Vendée Globe solo regatta, and kept an online video diary. This time around, she's documenting  the voyage online, too.

Back then, she collapsed from exhaustion after having climbed the mast of her boat in the south polar ocean, where she spent hours being battered around by stormy weather. Although she wasn't the first over the finish line, she became more famous than the winner because she had taken the public along with her in her boat and allowed it to experience the agony of a lonely extremist, constantly fluctuating between feelings of elation and depression. She gave a face to the sport of high seas sailing. Since then, she has been celebrated by the media as the "queen of the seas," has attained the popularity of a soccer star in her native England, and received the "Member of the British Empire" decoration from Queen Elizabeth II.

Dangers are everywhere

There is no reason to doubt that her current voyage will be any less spectacular. The waters of the Antarctic are filled with dangerous icebergs and discarded shipping containers lurking beneath the surface of the water. If MacArthur lets down her guard for even a moment, waves as tall as apartment buildings could rip apart her trimaran as she rockets through the ocean at speeds of up to 32 knots (about 37 mph). She's also constantly crisscrossing busy shipping lanes. During the first two days of the trip, MacArthur was only able to get a total of one hour of sleep because she was traveling along one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

Without proper preparation, she would probably have collapsed on the navigation table by now. But MacArthur was just as rigorous about preparing her body -- and her psyche -- for the challenges of the voyage as she was about her eight-ton yacht. In a training program at the Chronobiology Research Institute in Newton, Massachusetts, she learned to reset her biological clock so that short 10-20 minute power naps are sufficient to regenerate her strength. Using this method, she skips first, less-regenerative phases of sleep and falls directly into a deep slumber.

By taking a number of these power naps each day, she is able to ensure that her attention span suffers as little as possible. Although the € 2.2 million racing boat's autopilot can keep the craft on course, it doesn't keep it from avoiding obstacles like ice bergs and container ships, and it can't cope with changes in wind direction. MacArthur's trip will rarely be quiet enough to allow her to fall asleep for more than one hour at a time.

Another problem she faces is that unpredictable conditions on the ocean make it very difficult to establish any kind of set rhythm. According to Claudio Stampi, a sleep management researcher and director of the Chronobiology Research Institute, the effects of irregular life on board on the body and mind are "like permanent jetlag." If the abbreviated sleeping method developed by Stampi doesn't provide sufficient rest, a person's moods can fluctuate between good and bad within minutes. Self-doubt can then cripple the ability to make quick decisions, and can even lead to thoughts of suicide.

For meteorologist Schrader, who has been guiding Ellen MacArthur on regattas for the past three years, that means he has a second job in addition to forecasting. He will be paying close attention to her frame of mind when he talks to her on the phone during the critical phases of her voyage. He knows when to cheer her up or even curb bursts of excessive enthusiasm. He says that as a meteorologist, "one is always a bit of a psychologist, too."