Tracy Edwards: Why men felt so angry about female sailors
[0:0:40]
SA: So, how did it feel the first time you went to sea on a boat or yacht?
TE: Well, I get really seasick, so it was not a pleasant experience if I’m totally honest. The first time I guess I ever went sailing was with my dad when I was eight in a little boat from Hayling Island to the Isle of Wight and I just threw up the whole time and I thought, well that’s something I’ll never be doing again, sailing, that’s off my list of things to do. But then of course when I got offered a job as a stewardess on this beautiful charter yacht in Greece, to sail around the Mediterranean for the summer, I was like, Oh I’ll give this another go!
And off we went and I did spend two days – oh my God the sickness was, anyone who gets seasick will understand how just awful it is and debilitating. My favourite saying is first of all you’re afraid you’re going to die then you’re afraid you’re not going to die. It was just something I thought, well I’m going to have overcome it because I want to do this and for me it wasn’t necessarily an instant love of the sea or sailing or anything like that, it was these amazing people. This group of people that I had ended up with. We’d all ended up there somehow you know. None of us had gone through yacht clubs and dinghies or anything like that, we just ended up on boats. And for me it was the people, I felt accepted for the first time I think in my whole life at that point really.
Up until that point, my mum was the only person that thought I was capable of achieving anything. And here was just an amazing group of people saying, Yes, welcome, welcome. Come and join us. Come and be one of us. And it was just, I knew pretty much instantly, this is what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And I just had to manage the seasickness which I ended up doing. Then my love of the ocean developed and my appreciation of, just what I was able to do. It’s travel in a whole different way at that age. I was 17 when I got on my first boat and so I’d got my little cabin with my things and I feel safe and I’m travelling. So it was just extraordinary.
SA: And what had taken you to Greece in the first place?
TE: So my father died when I was 10 and my mother remarried an unfortunate individual. We did not get on and I never really told my mum when any of the – he was quite violent towards me – and I never really told my mum, she had so much to deal with. And I was being bullied at school and I become just a – when my daughter was born and I realised that my mum loved me more than I will ever love her – I looked at her and went, Mum, I am so sorry for everything I ever did to you! That realisation, I just turned into this awful teenager and I stole a car, I was arrested, I was drinking, I was jumping out of my bedroom window not coming home. Oh I was so angry, rebellious, aggressive, just horrible.
And when I finally got expelled from school after being suspended a number of times, I almost judge my headmaster for not expelling me sooner. My mum knew that I was on a road which did not look good and so at the age of 16, I can’t believe how brave – I cannot believe how brave she was – and actually how much faith she had in me, that she said, I think you should go travelling. So we had a sort of one of those uncles that isn’t really your uncle, who lived in Sibrina in ? [0:04:28]
She said, Why don’t you backpack through Greece? I ended up getting the Magic Bus in the end which used to be 4 days, loads of hippies from the UK all the way through Europe to Greece. And I began, my life travelling and working in a bar and that’s how I ended up being in this marina and seeing all these beautiful boats and crew would come in and they’d ? and I’d go, wow this life sounds amazing. I’m so lucky that everything that happened, happened. It could have gone horrible wrong!
[0:05:03]
SA: And did you have plans at the time or you were just going to travel?
TE: No plans, no qualifications. I didn’t, my mum made an arrangement for me to go and take my o’ levels and I didn’t go in. And I just threw everything back in her face and I do feel constantly awful about what I did and I think that is why I’m so precious about education now is because, if I do a talk in a school there’s always some bright spark that says, Miss do you think you were successful because you were expelled? All the teachers go, Oh! And I always go, No, I was successful despite not having a great education. You cannot beat having a great education and later on in life when I actually had to get a real job for a while, I didn’t even know how to write a CV or I had nothing, no substance. So yeah.
SA: And looking back on those days, the stewards you’re seeing on those boats, are there people you met there that influenced your life later on?
TE: Yes. My first cook, wonderful woman called Janey, who – Mike Corns who was the skipper had come in and said, You know, do you want to do some stewardessing? And said, Yeah, get me out of this bar. I went for an interview with her and no experience, God knows what I looked like and she just said, later on, she said something just connected and I thought, I’ve got to have this girl on the boat. And she became a huge influence in my life, as did he. And I again, I’ve been so lucky in my life, every single one of my skippers has had some influence on me or mentored me or pushed me, seen something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.
So the second trans-Atlantic I ever did, the skipper looked at me, and he said, Can you navigate? I said, of course I can’t navigate! I was expelled before long division! So he said to me, Don’t you think you should be able to navigate, do the things that you need to do on a boat to keep yourself safe? I said, Well, you navigate. And he said, What if I fall over the side? I’m like, There’s two other guys on the boat, I don’t know!
And sort of typical, err, 18-year-old. He said to me, Why are you being a bystander in your own life? And it was one of the most profound things anyone had ever said to me apart from my mum saying to me, every one of us is good at at least one thing. She had her fingers crossed at that point. And within 2 days he taught me to navigate and to me that was so extraordinary and it was another piece of proof I needed that. Maybe I’m not this useless waste of space and I can contribute.
And the other thing he said to me was, this is your life, you’re supposed to be playing the starring role, not a bit-part character! Okay, a bit profound for two days into the Atlantic but there you go. And literally after 2 days, he said, Right, there’s everything you need, take us to Portugal. And I was like, Um, but you’ve going to be watching what I’m doing? He went, No, no, we’re going to just end up where you take us! And it was one of the most momentous things in my life and sailing into Villa Moura was … just so amazing. And I still, when I think about it, I still get goose pimples and I’ve never lost that. So in 35 years or 40 years of navigating, every time we go into port, I do tend to turn round and go to people ,I did this, I got us here. And everyone is like, Yeah you’re the navigator, you’re kind of supposed to, but I never lose that thrill!
[0:08:43]
SA: And how did you move on then from being a stewardess on a yacht charter to actually being crew on one of the Whitbread round-the-world races?
TE: So life on board these boats is, you’re like a little travelling circus and you do the Med sea, then you do the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean or whatever and you all kind of all bump into each other at various places. And someone will usually say on a weekend, let’s go racing. And so I thought, oh this sounds fun and so I would get on the various people’s boats and go racing. It was the first indication to me though that there was such a thing as sexism. I’d never come across that before because I was a stewardess or a cook so I was where I should be. It was only on racing, not all the crews in racing, we were all there to do anything we wanted to do and usually had a beer in one hand so that was not very serious. But the first serious race I did I realised, oh, okay I’m not allowed to do various things on this boat.
And even learning was hard so I would sit and watch and do what I was told and so I just realised 2 things; that I loved this part of sailing that I’d never really sort of been part of and I’m really competitive and I had no idea at that point that there was thing in me that was really competitive! I couldn’t believe how competitive I was! So I thought, oh this may be the next thing I’m going to do other than sailing. I always thought it may be part-time and I was going out with a guy and sitting on his boat one day in Antigua and I pulled this book out of this bookshelf and it said, Cape Horn to Port. And I opened it up and the first page I opened it to was a picture of him, standing next to a broken mast on a boat. And I went, what’s this? He said, it’s the Whitbread Round-the-World Race and I thought, this looks amazing and said, Was it good? He said, Oh that was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.
So I said, Oh I think maybe I should try this. He said, No, they don’t allow girls. We didn’t stay boyfriend and girlfriend for very long after that. So I just thought, they don’t allow girls? What’s that all about? And literally a week later a yacht sails into the harbour and it was a Whitbread boat and so I went to see if I could get a cook’s job, which I got because it was an amateur crew and so they were paying to do the race. So I did the first leg on this boat called North Starter which was the most horrendous experience of my life. I thought we were all going to die and the skipper was awful. No one knew what they were doing. I was one of the most experienced people on the boat and that’s never a good sign when you’ve only been sailing for a few years.
So I got off in Cape Town which was the first stopover and the cook on Atlantic Pirate fell ill and there was no one else there so they kind of had to take me. And so yeah, I got on, out of 260 crew in this race (sound fades) about 20 boats [0:11:40] there were three girls and I was one of them. And I was the first girls to race on an ocean-racing max league and so this was the big league, the big boys. The rufty-tufty ocean racers. And I remember so many people saying to me, this is going to be so hard, you’re going to find this really difficult, it’s going to be so tough. I mean okay they did put me through it - the hazing and everything else – everything else you have to go through as a girl but I dealt with it and I learned. In the end they saw me as their little sister. Really bad for my dating prospects I have to tell you.
Seventeen brothers that looked like pirates. So in the end they started teaching me and I just absorbed the stuff and I just got to the end and I thought, Oh my God, that is like just the most fun you can have. And it’s not that hard, I mean if I can do it. Such a load of rubbish, it’s just such a well-kept secret. Let’s tell women this is really hard! So I just thought, I’ve got to go round again, and I am a lousy cook but I am a good navigator, so I want to navigate. I don’t want to cook for a load of guys.
[0:12:53]
But the only way to do that, my mum always said, this is the second most profound thought I had in my life was, No man is ever going to let you navigate on their boat, ever. It’s not going to happen. So she said to me, Well if you don’t like the way the world looks, change it. How do I change this? I’m just one tiny, tiny little person. She said, Well why don’t you start with yourself and then see what happens from there. So I thought, Well I can only start with myself and that’s how Maiden was born.
SA: And no one had ever done that in terms of going out and finding an all-female crew. So why did you feel you could do that at the time?
TE: Oh the arrogance and the naivety of being 23, or whatever it was, when I started at 23! Oh I don’t know. I’d never failed at anything apart from school. I didn’t understand what failure looked like and at that age, as we all know, you are often more likely to take risks. Initially I wanted to put the project together and I knew I had to learn to be a manager, project manager, do PR, raise funds, find a crew, do all of these things. But I was always going to be just the navigator. And I was going to find a skipper. That was always the plan. Because you don’t go from being cook to skipper on a Whitbread apparently.
SA: You thought, yeah!
TE: You’d have thought. But as I got further and further onto the project, we had no money, we never had any money but we collected people. People would arrive on my doorstep. I’m from America, I hear you need an all-female crew. Okay fine yeah, come in. And we all had 2 or 3 jobs and we had to sort of do a refit on a second-hand boat because we couldn’t afford a new one. But as we were going through the project, my confidence, I was never confident about finding the money, that was always my biggest worry but my confidence in how I could manage this did grow and I thought, I think I can do this. And I brought Marie Claude on who was this extraordinary French sailor with way much more experience than any of us. I brought her on really to set her up as the skipper.
We had a massive personality clash and in the end I sacked her and that’s when I thought, I’m just going to have to do this myself. I am going to be the skipper and the navigator which is quite unusual to do both. I do have to say, people often ask me what happened to Marie Claude. Well she went on to do the next Whitbread on Heineken which was much better for her, and we’re now best friends. And she’s now actually looking after Maiden. So we’ve gone a wonderful full circle with that one. It is lucky we didn’t race round the world together because we would have killed each other.
So, the other thing though, interesting that when Marie Claude left, it taught me that what we had done was we’d built this team in the image of man. Which was all we knew. We’d only ever of course sailed with men on men’s teams. Now women work differently. So when we removed Marie Claude, we had this flattened hierarchy and this much more level decision-making process. So I always had the last word. The skipper has to take responsibility, but we would have much more debate. So I’m the navigator and I’ve got to do watch captain. And you know, we worked out a system which worked better for women. So, what I would say out of almost every disadvantage that we had, we learned how to make it into an advantage which was a really interesting part of the process. So it kind of just happened that I ended up being the skipper and that my crew gave me the chance to sort of to do that.
[0:16:48]
SA: You mentioned that you had some huge personal sacrifices, financially, to raise the money. You re-mortgaged your house etc. Why was it so hard to find sponsorship do you think?
TE: I think it is hard to remember 30 years ago how impossible people thought it was for a team of women to sail around the world. People honestly thought we were going to die and even people who supported us were like, Oh I don’t know about this. And I think as we went along people were started going, Okay we were feeling a little bit more confident than we had first realised and we made sure always we were very professional. But I think, especially men that didn’t sail, to them it was such a huge thing for even men to sail around the world. How would women be able to do it? We had extraordinary responses to the 100s and 100s of letters we sent out. One of my favourites was, The thought of 12 of my wife sailing round the world fills me with horror! Okay, lucky wife I thought! Gosh, he’s choice! And the other one was, If you all die, it’s going to be really bad publicity for the company! So that was in a nutshell what we were up against.
We had small sponsors, loads of supporters, amazing. The whole of Hamble raised money for us, the village with their entry, even though we weren’t allowed in the yacht club because we were women. And we struggled and struggled and the in the end King Hussain stepped up and he had been sort of always in the background the whole way through and he was the second person I said that I was going to do this. And he’d said to me, Good, you must do this. This is important. And he’d always been encouraging me and unbeknown to me also when my mum died and I was going through my things, she also used to call him and say, I don’t know, I’m worried about this, and she’s doing that and she’s losing her temper all the time. And he would be like … so he was talking both of us through it, what an extraordinary man!
And so in the end we’d got so far. We were months away from being on the start line and in the end I went to him and I said, Can you help? He said, I was going to say, this is just ridiculous. World Jordanian Airlines will be your sponsor and that’s how she ended up that beautiful grey colour with the red and the gold stripe.
SA: Do you think it appears tough today, 30 years on, for a women’s crew to find sponsorship in that way?
TE: It is, it is still as tough. What happened after Maiden was interesting actually. There was then always a female crew in the race after that, except when they went with big Volvo 70s which no one could control strength-wise - men, let alone women. And they tipped the balance on the level playing field into not a level playing field. They have gone back to the Volvo 60s now which we can all sail equally. One of the very few sports actually that women can compete on a level playing field. So the next all-female crew kind of came about and then it kind of happened and they didn’t have enough money and then there was a mutiny.
So it was all a bit weird and then the next all-female crew, it was a male project that had a second boat and so they practised on the boat, got their new boat and thought, what are we going to do with the old boat? Let’s get a bunch of girls to sail around the world and then we’ve got two chances at getting good PR for the sponsor.
[0:20:24]
No new equipment, no money - here you go girls, off you go. So no one ever did as well as us. No all-female crew has ever done as well as us because I think the difference is we did it for us, right from the very start. The next most successful one was a boat called Team SDA. Now, they had loads of money, time, new boat, the most extraordinary women sailors on the planet were invited, but it was a male management team, and they didn’t tell them who the skipper was going to be until 2 months before the start.
So they fettered them before they even got going. They did win one leg and they’re the only other all-female crew to win any legs. So it has not been a happy journey for women’s sailing in ocean racing. In other areas of sailing we’ve now got 50-50 for the Olympics which is fantastic and that’s due to the work of some extraordinary men actually within sailing along with us. So it is still very hard to raise funds if you are a woman – not just in sailing - in many sports.
SA: And in business yes. You faced such negativity from women and men you’ve alluded to there. What do you remember at the time about the comments that people were making about you and the crew?
TE: Oh I mean, shocking. Absolutely shocking. And when we watched the film, in 2018, they had a preview in ? and we all went to watch it and we were going … couldn’t believe we had to put up with this! None of us really remembered how awful it was. I think we had just gone – at the time it was just like, oh whatever – that’s what they think. So we didn’t really react in a way that I would react today probably on someone else’s behalf. If a young woman was spoken to like that I would be up in arms.
But no Bob Fisher, the Bob Fisher story everyone loves, he called us a tin full of tarts in The Guardian newspaper! Just extraordinary! But then when we won our second leg coming into New Zealand, the headline for his article was I’m putting salt & pepper on my hat as I write this, and then he wrote, ‘They’re not just a tin full of tarts, they’re a tin full of smart fast tarts.’ And we were ecstatic! And someone went, You do know the word tart is still in that sentence? I’m like, Yes, but baby steps you know!
He was wonderful, Bob, and he really changed his mind about women in sailing and he has been throughout the rest of his journalistic life a huge supporter of women’s sailing, to the point when we rescued Maiden and brought her back again, a couple of years ago, he was there to welcome her in and he said to me, he was in his best Sunday suit, he said, I’ve come to see our favourite girl, and he said, Can I talk to you about girls’ education? And I looked at him and I went, Bob you have come a long way. And he looked at me and said … (dog barking b/g) PAUSE
[0:25:01]
SA: p/up re Maiden coming back
TE: So even to the point when Maiden was rescued a couple of years ago again and we brought her into the UK, Bob came down to see her in and I said, Bob this is so nice of you. Yeah I’ve got to come and see this important lady come back to the UK.
[0:25:18]
He was in his Sunday best suit and we sat down afterwards he said to me, Can I interview you? And I’d like to talk to you about girls’ education. So I said, Bob you have come a long way. And he looked at me and he said, I had a very good teacher! So you know I think what’s happening with what we’re doing now is that realisation that we changed so much more than we’d realised. Yes, not enough, we’re still fighting the good fight and I’m still hearing awful things that happen to girls on boats and well within any sport, anywhere -media, government, business - we’re still unbelievably still trying to get to total equality.
So I do get down-hearted sometimes but then we get people come and look at the boat and they’re like, you changed my life. This project changed my life. I did this or I did that. So it’s a great feeling but we really still have a long way to go.
SA: At the time you mentioned the likes of the media and Bob not talking to you about competing but talking about women as a group. People seemed very angry about what you were attempting. Why do you think that was, looking back?
TE: That was the weirdest thing. I knew people were going to go, I don’t think you can do that. Fine, you don’t think they can? Well we’ll prove you wrong. That was easy to deal with, but it was this annoyance, this anger. This, who the hell do you think you are encroaching on our area? So it was like we’d intruded into the big man shed at the bottom of the garden – the ultimate man shed at the bottom of the garden - and as if in some way our taking part in the race made it less than. And I don’t know why. I guess we proved that it’s maybe not as rufty-tufty as they would like people to believe and that if women can do it, people will know that it’s not this – I don’t know, it was a very strange experience.
SA: Interesting isn’t it? Like all the stuff in football. The horrible negativity around women playing and commentating and it’s a similar thing to that. I’d like to understand where that anger comes from.
TE: It’s like that part of, like the men who argues that equality and feminism makes him less. It’s that complete lack of understanding that if we are all equal, we are better and equality is better for all of us. I don’t understand men with daughters that say things like that. It’s as if they are in a separate world. And it’s this, I think just this complete lack of understanding that equality doesn’t make you less.
SA: Maybe we’ll get there eventually. You did mention before you set off how incredible it was that you were all working on the boat in the yard, literally rebuilding her. Did you all just learn on the job?
TE: Yeah, pretty much. We did have … Jenny was … so we had electricians on the boat. No way we could do that putting in the nav station and all that sort of stuff, but she was like their apprentice if you like. So they would get her physically to do the work so she would learn and they were great. They were just wonderful – Paul and Paul. They really made sure that she understood and that we knew that we could fix anything.
Everyone that helped us on that project was just extraordinary. And in the end, in the yard, because we were such a novelty, people did used to actually stare with their mouths open at the fact that there were a bunch of women working in the yard. Because I look at the footage now – there’s no health and safety, there’s no – oh, makes me go hot and cold now, what we were doing and using all these tools we had no idea how to use and borrowing things. Someone gave us an engine and someone gave us a generator – would you like, we’ve got an old water maker, would you like that? Yeah absolutely we’ll have that.
[0:29:45]
Rigging? Yeah, we’ll have the old rigging. So it became this really all-inclusive project and to their credit, the guys also working in the boats in the yard. I think by that point they’d realised they are serious. Yeah, they’re pretty serious about doing this. And they did, most of them, step up and would give us a hand and a lot of it, not made up on the way but we realised we had skills that we didn’t know we had. We’d realised we’d all learned more than we knew that we knew, and a lot of it was instinctive. So, replacing the winches with coffee grinders which means that you’re grinding using a different part of your body. We have different strengths. So really making the boat into an female physically-form-friendly boat. Oh that’s a good phrase.
SA: Lovely alliteration there!
TE: Yeah, we felt comfortable with and we fixed everything When we were at sea we could do absolutely everything.
SA: And so on to the race and you came third in your class in that first leg after Uruguay?
TE: Yeah, sorry third.
SA: Third sorry. And people were celebrating your arrival but you weren’t very happy with that place. So why was that at the time?
TE: We were gutted! We were absolutely gutted! We had just won – this isn’t in the documentary cos it didn’t flow – but the first race we ever did was a trans-Atlantic called The Route of Discovery and that was about 6 months before the start of the real race and there were 11 of the Whitbread boats and we beat all of them. And we came first. And second on corrective time. So we were very confident when we started. We can do this, absolutely. And the rest is interesting actually. It’s been lost in the mists of time and of course because it’s not in the documentary now, they’ve rewritten our narrative if you like, which is fine.
But yeah, so when we came third, we were just so disappointed, and it was so weird you know because everyone else was genuinely pleased that we were still alive. They were like, Oh my God you’re alive! This is amazing. We’d done really badly but it was also interesting to learn that you have a responsibility – the crew – you have to respond to other people’s feelings about you and it’s quite weird. You have to accommodate everyone. The whole crowd. So you had to join in and say, Yes, it’s great that we’ve done it and everything else but that, we were so … then we all went away to our hotel and huddled together and went, Right, the next leg is ours! And that’s how we set off on the second leg! Determined is an understatement!
SA: Looking at that leg and watching it on the film, it was absolutely bloody terrifying from just viewing it! What is it like to sail in the Southern Ocean in that way?
TE: Sailing in the Southern Ocean is like nothing else. Nothing will prepare you ever for it. People can tell you about it. I was the only one that had done the Southern Ocean on the whole crew and I told them - you can’t, you just can’t describe how awful it is and even the documentary doesn’t really fully show because Jo’s filming is so extraordinary - and then Alex the director said, It is Joe’s filming that absolutely makes this documentary.
[0:33:28]
On the other boats it was mostly interviews with the microphone. We’ve got the mains for number 2 up and we’re going in this direction at that speed, and that was it. But Jo would film these wonderful little vignettes. I can’t remember her filming this stuff. I don’t know where she was hidden in the cupboard or something, I don’t know? She does get a sense of that weird world that you’re living in. You know, you have been through deprivation, the sea is grey, the sky is grey. You don’t see the sun for weeks and the boat is grey and you enter this strange world of just you. It’s just you and you’re aware that there’s a fleet of boats out there and you’re always looking out for each other but it is, you know you put your head down and you know you’ve just got to get to the finish.
And there is great sailing as well – hurtling down the waves and going really fast and that’s awesome. We used to play Highway to the Danger Zone from Top Gun full blast sailing in these conditions! And then for us also and I think Claire says this in the documentary, for us also it was the realisation that we were all capable of so much more even than we had believed. And when a couple of the crew got on the wheel and we looked at them and went, Wow! You were hiding your light under a bushel, weren’t you? You were amazing and I think we flourished on that leg and we became the top of what we could achieve.
Obviously you have moments of doubt, but I was convinced we were going to win that leg and we did take huge risks. We did discuss the risks beforehand. I mean our insurance company would be having kittens if they could hear this. Saying things like, what do you think the chances of hitting an iceberg are? Well I mean if we were looking for a piece of land, you’d never find it, so I don’t think … this is how we did our risk assessment. Oh my God! So we knew we were going to take chances. We knew we were going to go by ? ourselves [0:35:37]we knew that was a risk.
We were the only crew that went south of the Kerguelen Islands. We took a very different course and it was the first time in my life I had had absolutely full confidence in my navigational abilities and allowed myself to believe in myself. And it paid off and of course there was a huge tragedy on that leg – one of the guys of one of the other boats lost his life which was just awful because we all knew each other pretty well - so that was terrible and a real reminder of where you are. It makes you feel very mortal. But of course then we finished the second leg and we were in first place. It was just vindication of every moment of that project and also the disbelief that everyone had that we’d won. They were like, what? What? And of course they thought it was luck – most people thought it was luck.
SA: And that was, I guess, not the reason, but you then went on to win that next shorter, more tactical third leg into Auckland. Do you think that was the point at which the public perception really changed when you won that third leg?
TE: Yes, for us we had to prove that this wasn’t a one-off and that we could do a short tactical leg as well as a long heavy leg and I mean that was an interesting moment for me because I realised tactics is not really my thing. But then of course I looked at my watch captains and I’m going, well they’re very good at it. So we realised we had everything we needed at that point. It’s a short leg – it’s 3400 miles – but you know we sailed into New Zealand after having raced Rucanor down the coast or was it Esprit ? I can’t remember – raced one of them down the coats, literally boat for boat. Then it gets dark and you’re like, Oh where are they?
So when we sailed into New Zealand, we didn’t know whether we were first or second and as we crossed the line everyone shouted, You’re first! You’re first! Was just, yeah, amazing and that is the moment I think that people went, Oh, okay, women can do this.
[0:38:03]
SA: And how different was it on the boat with women as opposed to the experience you’d had when you had been on the boat with men? Did it feel like a very different experience?
TE: Oh goodness yes, worlds apart. Worlds apart. We are not better or worse you know, men and women, we are different! So for an example, I got on Atlantic Privateer in Cape Town to do the long Southern Ocean leg and the first thing someone said was, Right let’s have a bet to see who can go the longest without washing? So, yeah. I did come joint-first I have to say. I had to do it but then the guys that I was joint-first with went another 2 days on land, yeah. So, the communication is different. There would be days on Atlantic Privateer when no one would say a word and for me that’s torture. You know, there would be a lot of grunting and nodding and, yes, yes – they’d communicate in a very weird way. So that was strange.
A lot of much more naked emotion. Anger, arguments, upfront sort of, so very … I don’t know … different. We were emotional as well but we never had an argument - and I know people don’t believe this but you can ask any of us - we did not have one argument on the way round. We had a few before we went – putting the right team together – but we didn’t argue. We had heated debates about which sails we should have up because I didn’t employ a crew of sheep you know. We all have very strong opinions – oh my God, a bunch of feisty women – but we were never rude to each other or disrespected each other.
There was a real sense of a huge amount of respect that we had amongst ourselves but not just for each other but for our personal space, for our possessions. The guys on the boat if they were hot bunking would just chuck whatever was on the bunk off before they got in and we would be like carefully … it’s like the biggest crime in the world is to get someone else’s socks wet. I mean, it’s so important you know these little things! So just more care and attention and a lot of talking. A lot of talking.
We would get to the point where people would go, what do you talk about? We’re like, Oh can’t tell you, really, really can’t tell you and it was just constant chatter and really to the point where we would sort of 2 days from the actual finish were going, We’ve got so much more to talk about! So it does make me laugh when men say, Oh I’d love to have been a cook on your boat and I’m like, no, no.
SA: You take us then on to that final leg. Can you just tell us I guess what happened as you finished at the end of the race? It’s so well documented in the film.
TE: It was just extraordinary. We, Howard, naughty, naughty man, he said, Oh everyone’s gone home ‘cos you’ve taken so long to get in. He said, There’s no one here. All the boats are gone. I said, Oh okay, right. Well our families will be there. We knew there were a boat with our families coming out and our friends and everything so that was okay. And that leg, oh that leg had been so long! We’d had run out of food, we had to dip into the grab bag which are your emergency food supplies. The last meal we ever ate on Maiden was fried chocolate cake! I can’t tell you, absolutely gobbing! And then as we were coming up the coast, we ghosted with no wind trying to get up to the finish. There was a boat came out from Weymouth with a hamper full of hamburgers but we can’t take outside assistance otherwise we are disqualified and they didn’t know. And they were like, We won’t tell anyone. We were like, No, we’ll know, we’ll know.
[0:42:06]
So please take them away! By the time we got to the finish we were ready, oh we were ready to finish! And then it just so happened that we finished on a bank holiday Monday and as the dawn, literally as the sun rose, we saw the needle and the timing was just perfect. ? [0:42:25] win. Rucanor got stuck on the shingles bank ahead of us so if we’d overtaken them that would have been great. But the wind kept shifting and it started picking up as we went up the Solent and then this boat came out and another boat and we thought, Oh maybe there’s a regatta on or something and they turned round and started coming with us. And then another and then another and I mean it just – especially ‘cos Howard said everyone’s gone – it was just so amazing and we were looking at each other going, Oh my God, this is just incredible! So 600 boats on the water they reckon. I mean churning the water up, there was? [0:43:08] flowers onto the boat – just amazing.
And then crossing the finish line as we crossed the finishing line, they’d ordered this special really loud canon and we all jumped out of our skins. You can see it on the film, we all sort of jumped like that cos it’s much louder than we expect, and then all the ships horns in Southampton blew and all the boats around us. I mean I was in bits, absolute bits - we all were - but it was just like someone created that for us because it was just so perfect. So perfect. There not one – well, apart from the fact that we didn’t come first – there wasn’t one single thing wrong with that day. Bruno’s so funny in the film where he says we came round the corner and there’s 100s, 1000s of people but they’re not there for us!
So ?[0:43:58] felt sorry for them when they came in and everyone was like, Yeah, go and park over there. Now, where’s Maiden? Fifty thousand people! Fifty thousand people on the dock. Watching the film for the first time is the first time I’ve seen the angle of them all running to try and get a glimpse of the boat and chanting ‘Maiden’ and what you can’t hear in the film is they’ve got the speakers on in one of the restaurants or cafes and they’re playing Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the Best’. It’s just like, I’m done! I’m done!
SA: Magnificently done in the film isn’t it? We were all in tears in my family watching it but it is beautiful, it’s a beautiful piece of production as well isn’t it?
TE: Oh they have done such an amazing job. I mean I am aware that that film will now become ultimately my memory of the race but they’ve done such an amazing job.
SA: And you went on to be awarded the first woman to win the Yachtswoman of the Year, how did the sailing community react to that at the time?
TE: I think favourably. It was a bit of shock and awe really. We had really shocked people into, not our way of thinking, but people were changing their minds and unfortunately I don’t think that really lasted but … and another thing was I think people thought, Oh it’s this bunch of girls. This bunch of girls can race against the world, and we’re going, No, no. All women can do this. No we think it’s just you and there was a sense of that. But no, and I have to make an awful confession, I didn’t know what the Yachtswoman of the Year Trophy was when I was offered it!
Because I’d come from a cruising background and this was all, as I say, still pretty new to me. So in New Zealand when Howard came up to me and said, Oh, you’ve won the Yachtsman of the Year Trophy, first woman in its 34-year history, I was like, Wow, that’s great Howard! What is the Yachtswoman of the Year Trophy? He said, in the Yachting Journal [0:46:00]? it’s really important. So Peter Blake gave it to me in New Zealand and it was beamed live to the London Boat Show, it was all just, it was quite amazing really.
[0:46:12]
SA: And what happens after an experience like the one you had on Maiden? Was it tough to say goodbye to the crew that had been such a part of your life for so long?
TE: Oh it was awful, it was just awful. It’s such a drop. Of course, 30 years ago no one was talking about mental health or how you deal with so much of what we’re talking about in sport now, we could have quite done with that kind of conversation. We feel off a cliff. The girls dealt with it I have to say better than I did because they all went off to new jobs. Racing, the next Whitbread or a race or a job or whatever. I, which was my responsibility, I stayed around to write the book and to work with Whitbread. Did a short film and did the talks and go to yacht clubs and keep the amazing momentum going and we sold Maiden the day after we finished, which was awful.
SA: Did you?
TE: Yeah, oh it was dreadful. Absolutely dreadful. And the girls went, and all the teams left, and it was just, became a ghost town. And I got married, which was a huge mistake! We both realised quite soon after that. We got engaged when then I was a whole different person and we knew we should have called it off but it was - sorry, my eyes are streaming with water, I do apologise – so we should have called it off, we knew that. But the momentum of Hello Magazine and the fairy-tale wedding, in the end we just had to go along with it. And we pretty much waited until everybody had gone away and then we got divorced. Just not the most sensible or healthy thing that either of us ever did. It was amicable which was good. (Oh my battery’s running low, I’m just going to get …)
[0:48:40]
Yes, so I fell off a cliff really at the end of the race and I took no care of myself. I didn’t ask for help. I basically worked myself into the ground and it wasn’t really until I had a complete breakdown that I realised that I was just living this very unhealthy existence. And I actually hadn’t taken any time off at all for a number of years and it was all just too much, and I had quite an impressive breakdown. And I mean this is something I would never have talked about even a few years ago but I think it’s important as we talk about mental health, especially in sport, that people see that supposedly strong people are not. We all have that in us. We’re all human and we must always make sure that we ask for help.
And in the end, Jo, wonderful Jo, drove all the way from Wales, 4 hours, middle of the night, found me locked inside my walk-in wardrobe with the phone still sort off like that and packed a few belongings, put me in the car and took me down to Wales. And it took me 2 years, yeah, to get back to any semblance of normal. And I was so lucky I had that to return to my home in Wales and had a small holding for a while and I bred horses and it was just perfect.
And then one day Howard invited me to The Yachtswoman of the Year Awards and I saw the big catamaran and I went, I want that! So (sound distorted) [0:50:20] which was the first all-female crew to try the ?, non-stop round the world, broke 7 world records, some of which still stand. And then I put Maiden 2 together which was the first ever mixed professional, mixed-gender racing team. That was 20 years ago. It was the most successful record-breaking team for a number of years. Never been recreated so it’s hard to work out that one and then asked about, I did a sporting event in? Qatar [50:52] which was an absolute disaster, they didn’t pay us. And that’s when I had to go and get a real job. and I’ve spent the last 15 years recovering from that. I had to start from scratch at the age of 43.
But five years ago, I found my baby, I found Maiden rotting in the Seychelles and all of the original crew we all got together and started a crowd funder and we bought her back again. Princess Haya who is King Hussain’s daughter - King Hussain sadly is no longer with us, he is very much missed - she got hold of me and she said, I hear you’ve rescued dad’s boat. And I went, It’s my boat actually but you know. What can I do to help? And she is just her father’s daughter. She funded the shipping and the restoration and the first part of our world tour. Which was amazing.
So what are we doing with Maiden? We are obviously not doing anything at the moment because of this awful virus, this dreadful situation that we’re all in. But once we restored her we were like, What are we going to do with her? I don’t really want to teach sailing, she is too young to be in a museum and it was a mixture of Princess Haya and my daughter and this conversation about inspiring girls, empowering women , lap of honour, girls’ education. Oh girls’ education! We went, right okay.
So we left the UK in November 2018 on a 3-year world tour which we got half-way through until in March of course we got stopped the same as everyone else. And so what we do is, for the first part of the world tour we were working with 6-partner charities. So we would fundraise for them. We have funded girls’ educational programmes all over the world which is amazing, and we have loved doing, but more than that we’ve learned how to raise awareness of girls’ education and how to interact with the whole process and also we’ve learned what part we can play.
We are a tiny cog in all of these amazing women, in all of these extraordinary things and Maiden plays her part. So when we get going again hopefully in April next year, we are going to be focusing on much more hands-on working with communities who enable girls into education and empower and support them to remain in education throughout their teenage years. So in developing countries, it’s physically getting the girls into education. In developed countries, especially in places like America and the UK, the dropout rate at the age of 15 for girls is huge. And it’s the same with sport.
So keeping working with communities, keeping that momentum going is hugely important and we know what happens when you educate a girl. When you educate a girl, you educate her family, her village, her community. You increase the socio-economic status of her country which she lives in. People are happier when girls are educated. We could eradicate world poverty. We could eradicate viruses because once women are educated, they pass on their education and so it’s endless. We could solve all the world’s problems basically if we had equality across the board.
And then of course once you have equality in education, you would hope we would have that in sport, in business, in government. You know, you look at the countries that are successful at dealing with this virus and look who they’re led by. And look at the ones who aren’t. Not going to go there but … so we feel we are just a tiny part of this hugely important move towards gender equality.
[0:54:56]
SA: Fantastic. And where can people find you and find out more and donate to the crowd funding?
TE: Sorry, the crowd funding is finished. It’s actually still trickling along so I’ll start that again.
So people can go to our website. It’s www.themaidenfactor.org Not the ‘Maiden factory’ as someone misheard me the other day! The Maiden factory doesn’t work! No it’s not a Maiden factory, no, no, it’s ‘themaidenfactor.org’ and you can go on there and you can donate, and we have a charity shop. We make our logo out of bits of Maiden’s hull that we have to remove when we were doing the restoration. Had key rings made out of the rigging.
SA: I bought one of those! Lovely, yeah!
TE: Oh thank you! Yes, so you need to go and find out then what we’ll be doing and in November we hope to reschedule that and open applications up again for people to sail on the boat which we have people sailing on the boat from place to place.
SA: Fantastic, and just finishing, talking about the documentary and so on, looking back on yourself from those, what 30 years ago now, how does it feel to see yourself on screen, exposed in that way on the big screen, looking back?
TE: This is something weirdly that we all experienced, and it was very unexpected. I couldn’t believe how together I was. I looked at myself thinking, I remember myself as being a bit of a muppet. Not really knowing what I was doing and the first sort of profound thing that I say, I literally turned to Jenny, I went, I don’t remember ever being that profound. She said, I don’t remember you ever being that profound either. And we also experienced this sense of, Blimey, we were quite impressive at that age and I don’t remember that at all. I remember us kind of muddling through it but no, and it’s the experience. What a gift, what an amazing gift, the experience of being able to look back in time and to see what we did and how we did it.
And for me as well what was really important was the way that Alex kept it real. He didn’t gloss it, it was raw and raw is the word that a lot of people use when they see the film and for me it was important, because I want girls to look at that and think, Well they didn’t look a certain way, it’s messy, they didn’t really know what they were doing, I can do that. And for me as well, when we sail Maiden into port now and we get girls coming down to the boat, it’s not just about fund raising and girls’ education, girls look at this boat, and they go I can do that. I can do that. If she did it, I can do this.
And Maiden shows what a girl can do if just one person believes in her and so it’s extraordinary what we’ve got out of the film personally but also for the project now, because in America when we were doing the stops there, we would sail in somewhere and people would be going, Oh my God, I just saw the film! Is that HER? Oh yes actually. Oh my God, this is the actual boat! Look Harold this is the actual boat that did the Whitburn! I mean just wonderful, wonderful, stuff. People in tears. Oh it’s just been amazing!
SA: And what piece of advice would you give to your younger self now, looking back with all that you’ve learned over the years?
TE: Oh, so this is two things. If I was to give advice to a young person now, it would be, I’m stealing this from my mother. I steal a lot of quotes from my mother.
SA: It’s what we do.
TE: Yeah. So, I wish I’d listened to her then I have to say. But she said to me once, there are two certainties in life. If you stand still, absolutely nothing will happen. That’s a certainty. If you move forwards and keep moving forwards, even if you don’t know which direction you’re going in or you’re trying to find your way or you’re uncertain of the path, something will happen. You are opening yourself up to the universe and opportunities. Now you have to grab those opportunities and you may have to change course but you’re going somewhere. And we know from experience, all of us, if you don’t have a job it’s hard to find a job. If you have a job, you have jobs coming out of the yin-yang. So I think that’s a great piece of advice for young people. If I was to give myself a piece of advice at that age, I would say, Ask for help!
SA: Excellent. Thank you so much, that was just fascinating. I’ve missed out whole chunks of my questions. There is much more I could have asked you.
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