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The purpose of The Addenbrookes Sailing Challenge is to help raise money (over £1 million is needed) for Addenbrookes Hospital who are desperately in need of a new model of robot.  

The robot is to treat people with Cancer such as prostate, testicular, kidney and bowel.

I plan to help them by offering my services free of charge as a skipper on the Sailing Challenge and to raise money through personal sponsorship.

My mother passed away several years ago after losing the fight to Bowel Cancer. Ironically, I was at sea in a yacht race making for St Malo when I received the fateful phone call. We'd pulled into Cherbourg due to adverse weather. We turned around straight back to Southampton.

Our aim is to sail from Southampton across the English Channel, on the first crossing to Cherbourg and then the second crossing to St Vaast, both on the northern coast of France. Weather permitting, it should take approximately 24 hours to sail there and back to Cherbourg and 30 hours for St Vaast. Cast off for the first crossing will be on Friday 22nd July, returning on Sunday 24th July. Cast off for the second crossing will be on Friday 5th August, returning on Sunday 7th August.

The demand for robot surgery has arisen from the increase of keyhole surgery, this robot technique offers several advantages – namely that recovery times are faster as small wounds heal quicker than large ones; the need to slice through as much skin and muscle is removed; so rehabilitation is quicker; the chance of post-operative infection is reduced; and the whole process is, literally, less traumatic.

The robot system also features tremor filtering, removing any shaking from the surgeon's movements on the controls before transmitting them to the machine's arms; and scaled movement, so that a movement of 1cm of the surgeon's hands becomes a movement of 1mm of the robot's manipulation. This is important for suturing, for example; the surgeon doesn't have to make tiny repeated movements to produce the very small stitches needed to rejoin the urethra to the bladder in radical prostatectomy.

Submitting yourself to surgery is perhaps the ultimate loss of control and the thought of losing control to a machine, rather than a human, is a difficult step. However, the object of robot surgery is in fact the exact opposite of surrendering to a machine, as the concept aims to restore control of the surgery to a human surgeon by playing to the strengths of both human and robot. Therefore, advances in robotics are helping surgeons perform a variety of increasingly complex procedures and in recent years has become widely used for prostate cancer surgery.

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