What am I doing?

As I finished work last week, as I'm less than a week away from leaving London, as I'm less than a month away from starting sailing, and as I'm reading about yet another tough start to a leg, I've been asking myself that question quite a bit. That is not, however, the point of this post. Instead, I've realised that while people generally know that I'm going sailing for a while, a lot of people don't know more that that. So I figured it would make sense, as I'm now getting ready to go and promoting this blog, to share that background, or at least the elevator pitch....

I'm crewing a racing yacht on part of a round-the-world race, going from Albany (south of Perth, Western Australia), to Seattle, via Sydney, Hobart, Airlie Beach (Queensland), Da Nang, and Quingdao. I'll be sailing about 16,000 miles over five months. It's a crew of twenty amateur sailors (except the skipper, who's a very experienced professional). The crew range have a wide range of experience, from some who have done a lot of fairly serious sailing to 'never sailed before in their life'. I'm somewhere in the middle, having always been interested in sailing, but never having done much before getting into this.

Yes, it's a race. Or maybe it's more of a race series, as it isn't as simple as 'fastest boat around the world wins'. Points are awarded for each individual port-to-port race. There are bonus points for hitting scoring gates and for being the fastest through sprint sections. There are penalty points, mainly for damage to the boat. Winning team gets bragging rights. There might be a trophy. Twelve boats are racing, all identical design.

I didn't pick my crew, though I've met a number of them through training. The race organisers put the crews together, balancing the experience levels, the legs people are looking to do, and other skills (e.g. I understand they try to distribute doctors around the boats as much as possible). They also seem to group on nationality -- ours is a very North American boat, with some other boats appearing to skew Australian, French, etc.

I was drawn into this by the posters on the Tube. Apparently, it's a hugely successful advertising campaign for them. If you're in London, you've probably seen them, people with half the picture in their normal clothes, half in race gear. I got on their mailing list probably five years ago. I went down a two-and-a-bit years ago to see the boats at St Katherine's Dock and talk to some people who had done it. Early this year, I was thinking that the stars of my personal and professional life were lined up about as well as they would ever by for something like this, so it was time to give it a serious look. In March, I did a training week to see what it was really like. It was cold. It was hard work. But I decided it was time to do it.

Initially, I had thought I would do the full round-the-world or not do it at all, but I dialed that back a bit. My notice period at work and my desire to stick around for the World Cup aligned nicely to a start with Leg 4 from Western Australia. Legs 5 and 6 looked like some great sailing and meant I would get to cross the Pacific. I would really have liked to do Leg 7 as well, go through the Panama Canal, and be able to claim a nice round 'half way around the world', but it was fully booked. And so my race was planned. I probably could have burned some professional bridges, skipped a few World Cup games, and started earlier, and it would have been cool to go to Cape Town and sail the Southern Ocean, but I felt that as long as I had the Pacific crossing, I had the super-heavy sailing aspect covered.

One other reason I backed off doing the full thing. Initially, I thought it would mean I would be at sea for the full Presidential campaign. Once I realised I'd be back on land for the worst of it regardless, I gave up. Trump. Clinton. Ugh.

One last thing in what at this point would only be an elevator pitch in the Burj Dubai, I am using this as a hook to raise some funds for GiveDirectly, an organisation that focuses on poverty relief in Kenya and Uganda. I will be matching donations, with an increased match based on how well our boat does. Please check out my fundraising campaign page for details.