Our most recent test sail saw me and Fear sail around the Isle of Wight and back. This has been one of the sails that has been on my bucket list of things to do for a while. The completion of this journey for me signaled the final step I needed to take to be ready to take on our challenge. To understand the importance of this trip I need to go back a little further and look at where my interest in yachts began.
My background has always been in dinghy sailing and that’s were my focus has been in terms of competing. As a kid my ambition was to go to the Olympics and as my disability progressed, that ambition evolved into going to the Paralympics. This was my sole focus up until the RS Venture Connect World Championships held in Oman in November 2022.
To compete as a para-athlete, you must meet certain criteria known as classification. This is a process that is used to determine what your disability is and how it affects you. It’s a complex system set out by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) that aims to enable fair competition so that no competitor is either given an advantage or a disadvantage because of their disability. My condition, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, is an ineligible condition according to the IPC criteria. This means that I cannot compete as a para-athlete. This was the news I received at the Worlds in 2022 after a classification review were I attempted to provide enough evidence that would allow me to classify but ultimately was unsuccessful.
This news was devastating, it meant that if sailing was reincluded as a Paralympic sport I would not be able to compete and represent GBR. After years of this being my sole focus, to say I was crushed was an understatement. Coming back from that world championship I felt lost. It felt like everything I had been working towards was taken away overnight. The one thing I had aimed for was suddenly unattainable no matter how hard I tried.
It would have been really easy at that point to just give up, but I knew ultimately that going to the Olympics or the Paralympics had never been about winning medals. For me it had simply been about giving me a platform on which to prove to myself that I could achieve things. Growing up I spent a lot of time being told I wasn’t good enough and that I would never amount to anything. My thirst for competition has always been about proving those statements wrong. A lot of the time the competition is irrelevant as really, I’m only ever competing against myself. Feeling like id lost that ability to prove myself, I needed to find a way to get that back because ultimately who was I if I didn’t have a crazy goal to work towards.
I have always been captivated by the sea and sailing around the world has always been one of those things in the back of my mind that I’ve been interested in. I’ve spent hours reading books and watching films about those who have taken on this challenge. The part that captivated me was that it was a test of them versus mother nature, a totally unwilling and uncontrollable force that you must find out how to work with rather than against. This instantly I knew could be my new platform on which to test myself. In yacht racing there is no classification, and this would allow me to not only test myself against others but also against the elements. It seemed like the ultimate challenge and so I tried to transition into yacht racing. This, however, turned out to be sightly more difficult than I anticipated.
To start with having had very little experience of yachts, I looked for opportunities to crew on other people’s boats. Despite years of competing, I was generally met by a fear of how I would cope given my disability. There was a weird catch 22 situation where I couldn’t get the opportunities because I didn’t have experience, but I couldn’t get the experience because people wouldn’t give me the opportunities. The few opportunities I did get I felt like I was being told that because of my disability I would never be able to do any serious offshore or solo racing as the physical demands would simply be too great.
Why have I been telling you all this. Well in short because the Solent has become a place of significance for me. It is the hub of all serious yacht sailing in the UK and is the one place where a lot of the great yacht sailors are based out of. This was where I hunted opportunities, and this is where I was told NO a lot of the time. I remember getting the opportunity once to sail with a famous offshore sailor, and I asked him how I get into this world. His response was that simply I didn’t have the finances or the background to do it and that it just wasn’t possible and I should pick a different goal. Of course, being me that just fired me up and meant that I sure as hell had to do it simply to prove him wrong.
Proving myself in the Solent has always felt like one of the ultimate goals. Even as project Fear has developed and I’ve gained more and more time on the water, I’ve tended to sail East rather than West avoiding the Solent and everything that comes with it. I’ve avoided reaching out to the boats that turned me down the first time and been nervous of asking for some of the big sailor’s advice simply because I haven’t felt worthy. In the back of my mind, I’m still nervous that what if they were right and this is too much for me. Sailing around the Isle of Wight and back would not only test me navigationally but also would mark me doing exactly what I had been told I couldn’t do, in the one place where I have always wanted to be taken seriously more than anything.
At 10:30am on Thursday 15th May, 41.5hrs after setting off I officially completed my final test sail, circumnavigating the Isle of Wight, covering 147.5nm in total. During that time, we had everything from 0.1 knots of wind battling against tide doing 2 knots of boat speed backwards to 20 knots of wind with tide, reaching a maximum of 9 knots boat speed forwards. We dodged tankers, battled tricky tides, fought with a broken anchor winch and learnt more about each other along the way. Completing this trip showed me that although, I may never feel ready to take this on Fear is.
I constantly doubt myself and with just over two weeks to go, the nerves are really kicking in now. What felt like an unattainable goal is now approaching very rapidly. I am trying very hard to keep my inner chimp under control and remember that even getting this far is an achievement. I now need to manically focus on all the final preparations and not think to far ahead. One thing Fear has taught me is that the hard bits don’t last forever and that whether there is no wind or too much wind, it will always change eventually, you just must hang on for the ride until it does. So, for now, day by day, breath by breath, one tick box at a time.
