Page 32 - Yachter Spring 2023
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32 RACING REPORTS
Atlas coming ashore for her refit
Warsash Maritime Academy and spent many happy years out on adventures and learning in incredible detail about how navigating
on a commercial scale was achieved. I was very fortunate to leave the academy and go into a job with the British Antarctic Survey, who took me on as a junior officer, threw me on a plane to the Falklands and then out to my first watch in the Southern Ocean. I’ve always been one to give things a go, but this was on another level. Luckily a calm first night at anchor and a very experienced Captain keeping an eye from the cabin below the bridge saw me through. I learnt
a great deal with the Survey. I sharpened
my ship handling and navigational skills
to a keen edge and after four seasons in Antarctica, many North to South traverses of the Atlantic from the UK to the Falklands, via the Canaries South or the Caribbean North, trips around South America and Africa, hosting Ambassadors, visiting and resupplying bases across the Antarctic peninsula and Weddell Sea, an attempt to
break the record of furthest vessel sailed South ever past 79°S, trips to the Arctic, gaining the Advanced Polar Navigation Certification, walking where no human
had and making the first footprints in the snow of a new cove or dealing with ice pack and 90 knot winds, or 30 metre seas, I can honestly say it was an incredible experience and it was strange to gain familiarity and comfort with the mythical Southern Ocean.
It was around this time that it was announced that the Sir David Attenborough or as many know her, Boaty McBoat Face was going to be built. I was fortunate enough again to be selected for the new crew and made some amazing trips to see her in construction, and across to Norway to train in Rolls Royce’s impressive facility on the new bridge systems. Star Trek Enterprise is as close a summary as I can make. So this was it, here I was, thirty, having walked on every Continent and sailed across every Ocean, newly married, amazing career, yet deeply unfulfilled and somehow not sure about
Atlas refit ashore
the future.What could be more than this
or would turn me away? I must be slightly insane. It feels it reading the above back to myself again, but there was one thing, to
be honest a dream, a fool’s hope, one that I am determined to achieve to the point of sacrificing all the above.To sail in theVendée Globe.
The race has captivated me since Dame Ellen MacArthur so valiantly raced Kingfisher around the World. I remember clearly seeing the photographs of her, alone, with nothing but herself to rely upon, playing a chess game against the Earth and yet looking so in control. It has long inspired me to follow in her and many other incredible British sailors’ footsteps to what is in my mind the pinnacle of the sport.
If this was my dream, I had to make
a plan, my ‘now or never’ moment had come, so I have spent the early part of my 30s creating and putting my ideas into action. After studying the route to the Vendée, reading everything I can about