In January 2024, I will be joining Leg 5 of the 2023-24 Clipper Round the World Race, sailing 6,300nm from East Australia to China, with a crew of 20-or so similarly crazy people, on a 70ft racing yacht.

While our team has its own fundraising target for Unicef, I am also raising money for the Multiple System Atrophy Trust – the charity that helped my Dad and my family so much while he was unwell.

What?

I’m one of the 70 or so members of Team Washington, DC, being led by our wonderful skipper, Hannah Brewis, and our first mate, Cameron McCracken. Some of these 70 people are “round the worlders” – as the name suggests, sailing all the way round the world. Others, like me, are “leggers” – i.e., sailing one or multiple legs of the race.

For more info, see here: https://www.clipperroundtheworld.com/race/leg/leg-5

To follow the fleet’s progress, you can track us here:

https://www.clipperroundtheworld.com/race/standings

My team’s page is here, where you can see the full crew, keep up to date with our successes (!) and read regular blog updates from Hannah, Cam and the rest of the crew:

https://www.clipperroundtheworld.com/team/washington-dc/team-hub

When?

Leg 5 is comprised of two races across the South China and the Coral Seas. This will take up the first two months or so of my six-month sabbatical:

Race 1:

• 22 January: depart Airlie Beach, Queensland (Australia);

• Sometime between 16-24 February: arrive Ha Long Bay (Vietnam);

Race 2:

• 27 February: depart Ha Long Bay;

• Sometime between 2-3 March: arrive in Zhuhai (China). This is where my nautical adventure will end (for now at least…).

Why…?

It’s a very good question…

I’ve always been petrified of the sea, have always suffered from sea sickness, and despite my Dad’s best efforts to share his love of sailing with his family, I somehow never quite managed to get on board with it (…sorry!). In fact, before Clipper, my relationship with sailing was pretty well summed up by the fact that I once passed up the invitation to join a family sailing holiday in the Caribbean – preferring instead to stay at home to look after the dog.

Dad sailed across the Atlantic twice, and I remember him coming home with tales of 60ft waves and swimming in mile-deep oceans while stuck in the doldrums. I felt terrified and nauseous just thinking about it.

My Dad died in 2021, after being diagnosed with Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) in November 2019. Naturally, I struggled a lot with my grief, and was both terrified and angry about having to come to terms with his permanent loss. People would tell me that he is always with me, that he is part of me – but I didn’t know how to tap into that, and couldn’t understand how, in his physical absence, I could ever feel close to him again.

So when, over lunch one day in summer 2022, my good friend Olive was telling me about her own Clipper adventure in 2013, I instantly knew this was the challenge for me - that this was how I would reconnect with my Dad, and how I could do something productive with my grief.

I signed up for the challenge that very same day and, over the following 12 months, completed my four weeks of compulsory training, gaining my RYA Competent Crew and Sea Survival qualifications. The training was a real mixed bag – of emotions, weather, and levels of nausea! In some of my lowest moments, after 48 hours of vomiting, I found myself questioning whether I can do this, even reaching for my contract to review the T&Cs to work out how much it would cost me to drop out. But despite having spent a decent proportion of my training being sick, living on extreme lack of sleep, being drenched and tossed around in 40kt winds, I am somehow still fully committed to seeing this through. This likely has something to do with the fact I’ve forked out over £10k on this bonkers challenge; but I also know (thanks to my Dad) that we are always stronger than we think. And that, no matter how gruesome it gets, my Dad will be there with me, every (nautical) mile of the way.