Episode 10 - Lee Gallacher

In this special solo episode of Oceans Unplugged, Lee Gallacher takes a step back from the interviews to reflect on the journey behind the podcast, a lifetime spent at sea, and the experiences that have shaped his career in sailing, racing, maritime safety, and adventure.

From growing up in South Africa and racing around the world to working as a coastguard officer, lifeboatman, harbour authority officer, instructor, and professional sailor, Lee shares personal stories, lessons learned at sea, and the people who inspired him along the way.

The episode explores the importance of adventure, continuous learning, traditional seamanship, ocean racing, resilience, and why sharing knowledge with future generations matters more than ever.

A thoughtful and honest conversation about life on the water, personal growth, and the adventures that continue to shape us long after we return to shore.

A huge thank you to our core sponsor YB Tracking. None of this would be possible without your help and the service you provide to thousands of people every day.

Transcript

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Welcome to Oceans Unplugged. I'm Lee Gallagher, formal professional sailor, mariner, harbour authority, patrol officer, coast guard officer, and lifeboatman. In each episode I'll be sitting down one-to-one with the people who push beyond the horizon. Ocean racers, explorers, rowers, and the leaders behind the world's most demanding expeditions. We'll expand on the guests as we get into it. Oceans Unplugged is proudly supported by YB Tracking, the global leader in race and expedition tracking technology. Helping bring the world's toughest adventures to life in real time. This is our stories, unfiltered and in-depth. So welcome back to Oceans Unplugged. This may be a couple of days late, and I apologise for that. It's uh been a busy few weeks. Um, as most people in the sailing world know, in the northern hemisphere at the moment we are in peak season, or is uh commonly known is silly season. Um excuse also all the motorbike stuff. It's the weekend, the sun's out, so I've also been out for a ride on the bike. Um I'm on my own today. Nick uh from Six Point Media is away working in the States and a little bit of a break. Um, unfortunately, the episode that we had prepared for this week uh with Glenn Sadler, um, ocean rower, uh spear fishing expert, etc. Unfortunately, the audio quality died. Um, so hoping to re-record that with Glenn. Um, and a few other episodes that we had planned uh with individuals, uh, their schedules change. Um so Liz Wardley is now middle of the Pacific Ocean, uh rowing uh two person uh across in the world's toughest road Pacific and doing really, really well. Even though they suffered a uh capsize and uh were knocked over and had a man overboard situation. So definitely look up the World's Toughest Road Pacific on YB tracking and YB races. Uh that's uh uh well an amazing woman. I can't really uh wait to speak to her. Uh Ollie here, obviously, he's in the middle of all of his launch of his boat uh for the Vonday Globe, and uh yeah, it's just manic for him. And the Vonde Arctic race has been going on, and what a phenomenal race that was. Um Sam Goodchild, uh, well, what a race he had, and it came right down to the wire there. Um, we're hoping to also speak to Tom Doolin, uh, who was in Le Solidaire de Figaro and was doing really, really well, um, and had won, I think, or at least been in the top three in uh the first and second races, and uh had a bit of a catastrophe in uh race three, but I'll leave that there and hopefully we'll hear from Tom in a couple of weeks. Um there's a few other people, but as I said, it's silly season for a lot of the racing uh people out there. Um so because we're approaching uh episode 10, um, I wanted to sort of reflect a little bit as well of the journey of this podcasting because it's all new to me. I'm still learning, um, hence why Glynn's uh episode didn't come out particularly well. Um we're using Riverside for remote or individual uh recordings like this, and uh unfortunately the as I say the audio just didn't come out there, it was a bit corrupt in the middle. Um I don't know why, but this is a new venture for me. I'm still learning, um, and a bit like sailing, you never stop learning. I mean, uh God, I've been sailing most of my life. Um I was very fortunate to sort of go surfing with my teachers as a kid growing up in South Africa, um, even though I'm British, I am uh British born. I'm born here in England and uh left, I think I was about seven, eight years old, something like that, when we went out to Cape Town. Um so although I'm British, I've got a British accent, put me next to any uh South African and I turn into an instant saffra. Um, but which is also part of the reason why I wanted to do this episode. Recently we've talked to Don McIntyre, uh the organizer of the Golden Globe Race, and we've also spoken to Gunnar Christensen about the Golden Globe Race, which is uh coming up uh later. Um, and hopefully we're gonna speak to a couple of other competitors. Now, the type of sailing I've done has been a mixture of pro racing at uh coastal and offshore and ocean racing, uh, but I've also done a lot of cruising for private owners, and the whole reason why I'm doing these episodes or this series, the podcast series, I had an owner that I worked for, and I I loved him to bits. He was a really, really genuine guy, lovely bloke. Um, his name was Steven Chapra. He owned a couple of cosmetics companies, um, and he was also into uh biosciences and isolating um proteins in uh ocean algae uh to develop for cancer treatments, um, amongst many other things. Uh really, really nice guy. Uh also had a supercar business uh with I think it was with David Coultard and Mika Hakken. I may be wrong on that. It was called um what was it called? Tetrarouge Assets. Um but anyway, Stephen himself, that's that's besides the point. Stephen himself, he was a down-to-earth, really, really lovely guy. Um known him for 18 years. His first uh company that made him uh some money, uh he named his first yacht after. Um, and I took that from St Catherine's Dock in London uh down to uh a little island called Carlaforte off the coast of Sardinia. Um and ever since that journey, Stephen and I really gelled as friends as well, not just as a yacht owner that I advised. Um he would phone up and pick my brains, um, and we'd have some banter and story. I'd run out of diesel on one delivery uh because the fuel gauge on a sailing yacht it said full, and it was a relatively new boat. Uh I dipped the tanks when I departed, and it matched what I saw on the uh fuel gauge. Um and he flew out and met us in Ibiza, and uh we were to sail from Ibiza through to Calaforte, and Stephen was on uh with me, and unfortunately we ran out of fuel, but the fuel gauge still said half tanks. So from that day, he has really ribbed me of half he dipped the tanks. Um and I also unfortunately stupidly put diesel in my motorbike once, so diesel became a bit of a nickname for me uh with Stephen. Um, but anyway, the reason I say about Stephen is that he was also uh South African, he was South African born, but very successful in business, lived in Australia as well, really lovely bloke. But through all the time that I knew him, he kept telling me, Oh, you should start a YouTube channel, you've got so much knowledge in your head, uh, you've been an instructor, you pro racer, you you should pass on your knowledge. Um and I kept saying to him, don't be stupid, I can't do that. I don't one, I don't know how to, um, and people aren't gonna want to listen to me waffle on. Um and unfortunately, Stephen went in for surgery a couple of years ago. And um his boat was in the middle of a refit, and uh a beautiful refit, and um unfortunately he We'd we'd caught up, we'd gone down to the boat, seen where it was, and uh he'd told me he was going in for this surgery, minor surgery, he said, and I'll see you next week. Two weeks later I still hadn't heard from him and uh I left messages and sent text messages and didn't get any response from him. So eventually I reached out to um his partner, Dee, and um didn't hear anything back from her. And then unfortunately, because of the individual he was in business, um it popped up on my Google feed that he'd passed away during surgery. So I contacted uh uh one of the other directors of one of his business and I said, Is this correct? I've just read this. And um the lady said yeah, unfortunately. Um Stephen's passed away um uh due to complications in the surgery. And uh it just blew me away. Stephen was such a lovely bloke, and and once the the news got out that he passed away, there were so many messages uh on the internet on different forums saying what a lovely bloke he was and how much he had inspired other people like me um in in doing different things. He always gave of his time. Um and then last year, obviously this this concept of doing this YouTube uh and podcast came up, and last year, uh just over a year and a half ago actually, I was uh sat a little bit tipsy looking at Facebook and um I saw a post that came up about doing stand-up comedy uh and raising money for charity. And stupidly I I signed up and um cut a long story short, I had to go and train for eight weeks to do uh an episode of stand-up comedy uh on stage, and it was in front of uh about 400 people, I think, in in Southampton. But it kind of reinstalled the confidence. I used to do a little bit of after dinner speaking, uh motivational speaking and team building based on my experiences from pro racing. Um but that was 20 years ago, and I'm now 27 every year. Um, so I didn't have that confidence, and that that um comedy experience gave me the sort of confidence again that I can speak. I yeah, I have got stories to tell, I have got some experience, I'm by no means an expert in any way, shape, or form. Um, and I know some of the comments in some of the forums are like, oh, what are you an expert? No, I've had experience in emergency services, I've had experience in uh professional racing, in yachting. Yeah, I've had a very varied career. And I'm hoping that some of what I've learned and done in life, uh, because that's what Stephen believed I could pass on, was that knowledge and experience to people who are going out to follow their dreams, follow their adventures, or start sailing, or after COVID learn how to socialise, because um there's a lot of young people out there that are really struggling to connect. Um, and I think that sailors, because we're so used to being out at sea, or on our own at sea, um, or we're put into teams, especially in some of the racing that I've done, which was corporate racing. Many people get onto a boat for the first time, never been on a boat, don't know anyone on, they've been thrown on a boat by their colleagues or by their managers. And we're putting those people together and we're teaching them how to communicate. So, from this series of oceans unplugged, part of it is that I'm hoping to have those sort of sit-down coffee shop chats with, as you've seen, some pretty amazing sailors from DKI, Pip Hair, uh, Don McIntyre, Gunnar Christiansen, loads of other people as well, but also explain a little bit about the sponsors, YB Tracking, um, and hopefully inspire people. And the reason I wanted to come on to today is that obviously in the recent episodes I've spoken to Don McIntyre and Gunnar Christensen, and I've read the book about the 1968 Golden Globe Race, which was known as a Voyage for Madmen. I mean, this was people who were getting onto a yacht and they were going to sail around the world single-handed, never been done before, they didn't even think it could be done. But all of their food they had to have on board, they couldn't stop. As soon as they stopped, that was it, game over. Any water that they had, they had to save and store from rainwater or try to desalinate salt water and catch fish and survive. And they couldn't speak off the boat like we can now with Starlink or satellite phones. I mean, I'm project or sorry, uh designated person ashore, first responder for Ella Hibbert, who you have seen on the episodes before, sailing solo up in the Arctic Circle. And when things go wrong or she needs to communicate, she literally can pick up the satellite phone and give me a call, which she's done. And um, being on the motorbike and then seeing a satellite phone while you're literally the designated person, I'm sure, um, apparently rather amusingly, because Debs was riding her bike near me, didn't know what was going on. I literally pulled up, stopped the bike, my helmet went rolling across. I did have to get another helmet, uh, because I thought something had gone wrong. As it was, she had credits on her phone, she was feeling a bit lonely, and just needed to chat. Whereas in the 1968 Golden Globe Race, and the same as the Golden Globe race now, they can't do that. It is literally single sideband or VHF radio. So uh they can pass a message to a passing ship, and hopefully the passing ship can use their satellite phone call or or uh call via um port control when they've entered to pass on a message. And I highly recommend that you look up the race on YouTube. There is that Void for Madmin about the uh 2019 race, I think it was, or or 2018 race and 2022 race. But in that race, it's not just the communication that is going to be a challenge for them, it's also gonna be that isolation and those experiences when they come back, being able to tell um the younger generation of how they can be a little more comfortable and confident in themselves, but also some of the duties on board that as a skipper you've got to do um looking after. When I raced around the world, we literally would swap a person every day. So you'd have four hours on, four hours off, two hours on, two hours off during the day. Um, and that period between 4 pm and 8 pm we called the dog watch, which was that two hours on, two hours off. It would swap. And one person would come off a watch, and for the next 24 hours they would be called mum. And they were the people or the individual that would do all of the cooking, all of the cleaning of the boat, because you've got to keep it um clean, hygienic. Um, and as I've spoken to kids in schools, there's many a moment where I was amazed, because the toilets, the heads, were at the front of the boat, and I was amazed how much pubic hair could travel from the front of the boat to everywhere else on the boat, and even in the kitchen, the galley where you're cooking, stuff was on the floor, and you're like, How the hell does this reach here? So there are so many ways that the experiences and the stories and the knowledge that is gained on a boat for a solo sailor or for a team sailor that can be passed on. And if you don't use those knowledges and the or the knowledge and the experience that we've gained on board boats to pass on to the younger generation, besides the adventure and the experience that you're gaining, what else is there? You've got to pass it on. So while I was talking to Gunnar, we we started talking about food as well, and and we talked about food with Don uh McIntyre. Um, and I watched one of his live uh episodes with um, I think it was David, uh the Israeli guy, that is uh an entrant for this year's Golden Clobe Race. Um, or the the next Golden Clove race. And they started talking about food and dry food and wet food, etc. Now, obviously, as I said, I grew up in South Africa for a little bit. I am British, but at the core I believe I'm a saffer, uh South African. Uh but uh to South Africans I'm known as a limey, uh, which was all about the limes keeping the sailors healthy, all the citrus fruit. Um, and the background story from that, now as I understand it, and I may be corrected, is that when sailors left Portsmouth here in New Hampshire in England, and they were travelling around the world, they didn't have fresh fruit or fresh vegetable, and as a result, they were getting scurvy. And it was a doctor from the Royal Hospital Hasler in Gothsport, in Portsmouth Harbour, that discovered that citrus fruit would help them. Um so by the time the sailors got to South Africa, and of course they were having oranges, limes, etc., British sailors became known as limeys because they had these citrus fruits. One of the other ways that uh English people are known in South Africa, especially people who lived in South Africa, but they were British like myself, was soatis or soap peels, uh, which is basically salties or salt dicks, basically, because one leg is in the UK, one leg is in Africa, and your genital's in seawater. So I've always been known uh by many of my South African friends, Sapphas, uh, either as Limey or as SOTI. Um, but by heart I am a SAFA. And the reason I say that is because today I actually bumped into a friend of mine, uh Stefan Fenter, who he's kindly given me a load of uh Biltong, and he owns a company called uh Biltong Merchant. Now, the reason I've I want to talk about this is that when you're on board your boat, especially for the Golden Globe race, they have to store their food on board. Now, going back on to the 1968 race, a lot of food that was on there it was either tinned or they didn't have as much freeze-dried or dehydrated food back then. It was literally tinned, um, or it was dry food uh of biscuits and things like that. Or it was bacon and and stuff that could be sort of cured or or salted. Um, but growing up in South Africa, I ate built on lots of this. So uh, Stefan, thank you. Um now these two packets here I am actually going to drop off to um Dunner because he's only down the road. Um, but this is salted South African beef or kudu or ostrich or anything, um, but there's a lot of protein in there. So when you're packing your boat, um, and these are the lessons that come from the 1968 race or any other round-the-world race, pro races need a lot of calories, a lot of protein. I mean, uh talking to Gunner, yeah, he was like when he was doing some of the deliveries and it was solo, unlike pro-race ones where you are just burning calories. I think at my peak uh performance, I weighed just over 10 stone. I was a 30-inch waist, a 15.5 inch collar, um, and I was consuming somewhere between 7.5 and 10,000 calories a day, and I couldn't put on weight. I was it literally, people used to go joke and say, are you 65 kilos wet through? And I was a bowman or a uh snake pitman, so middle of the boat, um, and a bowman is the one right at the front, the wet end, the one getting thrown around, bounced around, the one climbing up and down the mast uh like a mast monkey. Um, and unfortunately, I ended up taking a bit of an injury, unfortunately, through uh falling down a mast. But even consuming the amount of calories and protein that you need to just to keep going. And one thing that people don't realise on boats is I mean, now, unfortunately, as I said, I'm 27 every year, um, slightly over the the wrong side of 50, but anyway, when you're sailing, um you're even when you're sleeping, you're still moving because the boat's moving. Um, and as I spoke about in in one of my other roles, I was a pilot launch coxswain and a harbour patrol uh marine officer, and even sat in your chair or or led in your bunk or whatever, if if you're at sea, you're still led there, the boat's still going, so you're still doing all this, and you can be fast asleep, but all your joints, your core muscles, they're all moving, still burning energy, still exercising, in effect, uh, which is why I am now not a size 30, pushing a size 38, I think, but um uh yeah, you just have to consume all of that food, and unfortunately, when I when I stopped sailing, uh I was still consuming a lot of food, I'm still used to that. Um, and now obviously I've got a pot belly, look like a Vietnamese pot belly pig. Um, but you have to consider what you're gonna eat. So one of the guys I helped, oh god, when was it? This was about 2004, I think, 2005. Um I I was doing a delivery across the Atlantic. With a guy called Brian, and it was a Boston smack, a lovely wooden boat. It was 55 foot, I think, overall. I think it was about 38 foot length on the waterline or length on deck, and then it had this massive bow spread on it. So very much like an old pilot cutter. It was gaff-rigged, beautiful. Brian, the owner, he had literally rebuilt it. And myself, I'd helped him. Another guy, Colin, I miss Colin actually, I haven't seen him in years. We used to have a joker, loads of jokes with him. But anyway, so Brian had rebuilt this boat anyway, in what used to be a wooden boatyard in Emsworth, in Hampshire, almost on the West Sussex border, that was called Dolphin Quay, a proper wooden boat yard. And many a time we'd be in the yard uh helping Brian out. Um when he finished the boat and it went in the water, obviously after after all the caulking had been put in. I think we we were there for 36 hours pumping the boat out as it took up the water and the plank swelled up and everything. Um but anyway, cut long story short, we I was sailing doing the delivery with uh Brian um across the Atlantic, and uh because it converted it to hydraulic sailing, uh hydraulic steering from a tiller, and that originally it was a massively hard tiller and steering that boat, bearing in mind those boats used to be sailed by man and boy, as they called it. And man was like 15 to 20 years old, and boy was like somewhere between eight and eleven years old, and they were doing a lot of the fishing and stuff. The same as the old Thames barges. I used to race on sailing barge kitty. Again, they were taking coal uh or even sewage out of London, and they were saying sailed by man and boy. 80 foot long, solid oak. I mean, the the width of the oak keel inside a Thames Barge is probably two of me wide, and it's inside the boat, and they were only about three foot deep with dagger boards on the side. Um, anyway, I digress back on to uh Brian and we got into Cape Verde Islands, uh, we went into uh a little town there called Aspergus, uh which was a port of the island of Sal in Cabo Verde, and uh we because we'd we had the hydraulic wheel steering it, it developed an issue on the pump. Um every now and then you'd be steering, and then there was nothing on it. And in fact, before we got to Cape Verde Islands, we stopped in Las Palmas. Um we were at anchor, and there was uh myself, Brian, and there was another lad who was doing a delivery. Um God, I can't remember his name. Anyway, we decided that, or the the Harbor Authority wanted us to bring the boat into Las Palmas Marina. Um, so we literally had it on tick over, and you've got a 15, 16-foot bow sprit stuck out the front, uh, and we were coming in on just literally in tick over, doing knot and a half if that, and all of a sudden we lost steering and spinning the wheel, nothing, and eventually the air bubble in the system cleared, and the boat started to get some grip on steerage, but it was a bit too late, and unfortunately the bow sprit came out and we we clipped a boat and took them off the pontoon. Um, but yeah, so we got down to Aspergius and we decided by that point it was too dangerous to go across the Atlantic with this intermittent issue with the hydraulic pump in this air bubble, and we bled it out multiple times, but somehow in the pump it was sucking air in. It wasn't um in the system, it was actually getting in somehow. So while I was in um uh Cabaveri in Aspergus, we went down to the south of the island to uh oh uh Santa Maria. Uh ended up staying there for some substantial time. Um beautiful island. And I met this um well, there was an Irish bar down on the site. Everywhere you sail, there's always an Irish bar. Uh went down to the southern end of Santa Maria, sat there in an Irish bar, and I ended up meeting this bloke called Terry, uh, who looked like Telly Savalis uh for the older generation. Yes, he was. Um, and there was another bar nearby which we ended up nicknaming the office, and we met up there pretty much every day. Uh had a meal, uh chat, and uh Terry one day just said to me, he said, if you had the money, what would you do here on the island of Santa or of Sal, Santa Maria? And I said, Well, I I've been here a few weeks now, and I've noticed that there's a pretty major hotel up the road. I think it was a five or six-star hotel at the time. There's multiple properties around here, and it was at the boom time of uh being able to buy a one or two-bedroom property for like £20,000, 30,000 uh pounds. And the same as in Spain, they were little sort of communes with a swimming pool, etc. And um I said there's a lot of people here that are buying holiday properties or here on holiday, but there's not much to do besides a little bit of windsurfing, kite surfing, because that was just starting, um, or a little bit of diving and quad bike riding because it's a volcanic island, that's it, really. Uh or sit by the pool and get drunk. Uh so I said, if if I could, I'd open a yacht charter company here. And there's nothing else. Uh and he was like, okay, yeah, so he said, Um, meet me tomorrow. So the following day, uh, met up with him and he said, uh I found out that the London boat show's on. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He said, uh, do you want to go? And I was like, we're in Santa Maria in in Cabo Verde. He's like, yeah, I just want to go around and have a look and you you show me around. So I was like, okay, yeah, if you're buying or you're paying the tickets, I can go home. I've been here a couple of weeks, I'm running out of underwear and medication. Um, so yeah, if you're gonna fly me there and fly me back, I'll I'll take a trip home as well and get some change. So we flew back to uh the UK and um we ended up in London Boat Show. I thought I was just gonna take him round, show him round, tell him what's what, and uh I kept talking to him and and and saying, look, if you're gonna set up a charter company, buying a boat over 40 foot, you you're paying a lot more money uh for a lot more size. Um, you're not gonna get more bums on seats. This is sort of the breakdown of it. Um, and for some reason, by the end of that day, we'd walked away buying two Bavaria 46s, um, and he was gonna kiss them out, code them in in England, and uh then take them down to Cape Verde Islands. And somehow I ended up named as one of the directors on this company, uh, which was with Jordans in um uh Jersey or Guernsey, uh, and how I ended up named on it, I don't know. Uh, but it was one of those things back in the uh early uh what was it, 2000s. And uh yeah, so he bought these boats and we took delivery of them. Uh I didn't get any money by this, I was just advising. It was a bit of a uh a fun ride. I mean, obviously after the show I flew back to Cape Burdy and did the uh transatlantic, but um yeah, there's just so many different paths of sailing that uh little stories like this that you you kind of end up on, and uh anyway, part of this, the reason why I talk about this now, this is just a random me chatting rubbish really, is that in all of the journeys I've had, I never really knew where each one was going. But each part of it was a the next stage in a story, um, the next stage in learning and experience, and as I've said to many of the students that I've taught uh for Hamble Yacht Service, uh sorry, Hamble School of Yachting or uh Humble Point Yacht Charter, um at Botability, uh all the different schools I've taught for, is that don't ever stop learning, and just because you've done a course, that isn't all the learning that you're gonna do. Because once you get your certificate, that's the start. As I say to a lot of people, is you go and do your comp crew, uh uh Royal Yachting Association comp crew, be it on power, motor, or whatever, or your powerboat level two course, a two-day learning how to drive a powerboat. That's basically like your L plates. You've now got the beginning lesson to go off and learn. Get on as many boats as you can, um, get as many different passengers as you can, different skippers as you can, because you're gonna learn so many skills about sort of the food that you eat, the different type of boats, the different type of weather systems, the different types of cultures that you're gonna be. And each boat will give you a different perspective. I mean, I I mentioned it in another episode that I've done a transatlantic on a catamaran with this mad American who was a raving alcoholic and had firearms on board. That was a lesson in starting to profile before departure. And I'd literally met him like three, four days before in in the sailor bar in Las Palmas. And if anyone's ever tried getting um onto a boat to do an Atlantic crossing, or you've done the arc or done an Atlantic crossing and you've gone via uh Grand Canary and Las Palmas, you know the sailor bar. It's been there 20 20 odd years. I mean, I I've got some friends that were actually involved in building that bar um uh as it was all set up and the marina was being set up. And uh yeah, I remember the marine police that looked like uh Freddie Mercury from uh Queen, uh who used to have painted jeans. And anyway, get just what I'm saying is get out and experience, live life. And after COVID, the reason I say it is that I remember being in lockdown just before I before COVID happened, I was still working for the the local port authority as a harbour master patrol officer and a berth officer and a pilot launch coxswain, and I was still sailing and teaching powerboating and sailing, and I kind of got to a stage where I was like, is this all it is? I'm just doing shift work and and sailing, and I'd kind of lost that passion for sailing, um, and I was doing corporate racing, and it just I wasn't feeling inspired in doing what I did. So I got to that point where I was like, right, I've got to do something, and I'll go and do super yachts. And I got invited to go on to a beautiful um Aberking and Rusmanson 140-foot uh catch uh called Asgard with uh a really nice captain, um Alex, who was really wonderful individual, um, and the co-captain on that um Ian Fagg, he was uh and I still uh uh in contact with both of them, they're they're brilliant guys. Um but unfortunately, when uh working on Asgard, we're taking it down to Pempole, uh sorry, not to Penpole, to um Pendennis Shipyard down in Fanworth. It gone into the shed, we were in the middle of the refit, and lockdown happened. Um and unfortunately, even though shipyards were cast as construction, it it did get minimized and the that job ended, that contract ended. But being the person I am and the work ethic I've got, I ended up uh because of the background having worked in police force and um worked in in uh Coast Guard and worked in lifeboat and stuff like that. I've dealt with uh mental health um and I've done a little bit of care work way back in the early 90s, uh part of the what is now the King's Trust, it was actually uh Princes Trust back then. I did the Princess Trust Volunteers Programme, uh so I was 20, um, and as part of that we had to do like care work. Um so I've kind of had that experience. So during lockdown, um I worked for a men's men's mental health detention unit or or a um care home, whatever you want to call it, but some of them were there uh having been sectioned. Um so had to do some of that work. But then I got the opportunity to go back onto some of the super yachts and um do some deliveries, and which was kind of weird that I was still allowed to travel around the world, admittedly with restrictions. Uh I couldn't arrive in Barcelona, go shopping, etc. Uh, when we arrived in port, we had to sort of stay in port a little while uh under quarantine, and then I could get on a plane uh with my uh sailors' passport, the seaman's discharge book or mariner's discharge book, and uh fly back to the UK or or fly out to Palmer and stuff like that, which was a bit weird. But um the point is your life, uh especially if you want a varied career, uh, life at sea is definitely one that will give you that, and it will teach you so many different personal skills, personal experiences that you can share and help others. And uh, I mean now, yeah, I I'm working with uh YB tracking and using my knowledge and experience of yacht racing um to help event managers this week alone. Um someone had actually pressed the red button on uh a tracker, and whilst we don't we're not a safety device, uh we are a tracking device, they had um our Garmin inreach that also couldn't uh uh communicate out. Um but we were able to get messages back to uh the casualty and uh the event organizers use their standard operating procedures and uh coordinated with local fire and rescue uh to go and uh recover the person. So wherever your career path goes, what I'm saying is uh take every experience and learn from it. In fact, that kind of reminds me. In my high school, so this is in Edgemead High School in South Africa in Cape Town, we had a teacher, an English guy, who had we all knew he was gay, but back in the 80s, um 70s and 80s, obviously being gay in public was not particularly allowed, uh especially in South Africa. It was um an entertaining kind of period, I suppose, if you were gay uh or not entertaining, it could have been dangerous. Uh but South Africa in the the 80s and 90s was a different place anyway. But um, yeah, Mr. Dixon uh he also rode a motorbike, and he was going off to teach in Canada, actually. Um very thespian, loved Shakespeare. Um, and just before he left our school, he was riding his motorbike, had a motorbike accident, broke his jaw, and it was all wired up. And he came into the school, and I'll never forget it. I think it must have been about 14, 15. He was on stage and he had stopped taking his pain control to talk to us. And he's right off his talking like this. And he was saying, basically, you will go through your life with a backpack, and that's an invisible backpack. And in that backpack, you will pick up pebbles, uh, and those pebbles are experiences. Some of them will be very heavy, some of them will be very light, and some of them will be vibrating with so much energy it's unreal. And what he said is keep picking up every single pebble that you can, because you will never ever fill your backpack. And from that lesson from him, I I mean I've been fortunate, I've travelled around the world, I was very fortunate to have grown up in Cape Town in South Africa for almost 10 years. Um, yes, it was during apartheid, and um, yes, we had a maid and a gardener out there, um, Temperance and Michael, and I will never forget Temperance, um, who was like a second mum to us. She lived in the house, it wasn't one of these situations where there was a maid's quarters at, and we only lived in a three-bedroom house, it wasn't anything. But one of the things I learned coming back from South Africa, um, I remember being sat with my grandfather here in the UK, and we were watching the ITN news, and they were uh filming a piece uh in in South Africa, and there was all these bodies led on a uh patch of grass in Cape Town, and it was near the old power station in Cape Town. The power station isn't there now, I think it's a hotel of some sort, and they were basically saying that all of these people had been attacked and they were dead and everything. And I was like, Granddad, I go past that plot of land every day, and basically they were berkees, as we used to call them, uh, and in England you call them tramps uh or homeless people, and basically they used to do uh dacha, which was cannabis, and they'd break a bottle in half, they'd take their papers and make a roach in the the bottleneck, and then they'd stuff it with uh cannabis or marijuana or dacha, as it was called there, and they'd smoke, and then they would sort of be a bit dopey. Um the other trick was that they'd take a full loaf of bread, they'd break it in half, they'd pour half of uh, or through half a loaf of bread they'd pour methylated spirits to filter it, throw that section away, and they'd drink the methylated spirits or the filter methylated spirits and the other loaf of bread, and then they were literally out of it. And those were the bodies that were there. So it kind of taught me that sometimes what you see on um TV isn't necessarily the real story. Um and when I came back to England from South Africa, and this is not long after Nelson Mandela had been released, um, and some of my dad's staff had said obviously there was land grab and stuff like that. Um, and and dad's staff from Blue River Meat Company and from all of that had basically said, Look, it may not be safe for you, um, so you might want to leave. My parents were stubborn, they stayed. Um, I was offered an opportunity back here in England, um and I came to England, and unfortunately that that opportunity uh with my real father, my biological father, never happened. Um but the one thing I learned I came back to England and in my first year of being back in England, uh which was in fact I landed August Bank holiday Monday, 1990. Um in my first year, I got taken in and out of doctors and AE for um injuries because I had a South African accent. I've really focused on losing it since then because I was white and had a South African accent, even though I was British born, had a British passport. Um but there was more racism in England um back in the 1990s than there ever was in South Africa. The difference was that there was a term for it, and yes, there was uh segregation, and there was definitely some level of uh racism like in the rest of the world. But one thing I learned was that well-traveled people learn more about cultures and individuals, and the people and the colours of the skin don't matter, and by sailing and traveling so much, and being part of the world is so much more important. So, anyway, that's my five cents for this week, and it's supposed to be about travelling the world and oceans, and hopefully, my random chat this week has been uh that you've learned more about me and why I kind of tick the way I do and why I want to do the podcast, um, because it's to honour Stephen's belief in myself, um, that I can pass on knowledge and wisdom. And if you've got any questions about boating, sailing, powerboat, whatever, all food or victualin, this stuff, um GPS tracking, uh, or even GPS spoofing and and ghosting, where's that going? Um, I was talking to a colleague recently about it because it's becoming more and more of a thing. Now, at the moment, it's a lot of commercial ships in the Baltic, in the Red Sea, in the Mediterranean, and obviously in war zones, that GPS is being jammed, spoofed, etc. And a colleague said, Oh, it's not the the products that are coming out to resolve these issues aren't for the leisure market. But the leisure market is starting to experience it. We are seeing some of that stuff happening um down the uh eastern coast of uh Brazil, Argentina, around the Caribbean, whether that's organized uh crime doing the GPS uh jamming or not, don't know. But there is some things going on around the world, and the world is changing, so it which is why when I spoke to Gunnar and to Don, there is that resurgence of learning the traditional sailing skills and having the um the skills of navigating by use of the stars or the sun. Um so keep keep listening, we've got some stories uh and some guests coming on. Hopefully, uh one of the instructors uh to teach celestial nav, uh Nigel Rennie, uh will be on. And um yeah, hoping hoping you're enjoying it anyway. So that's my forty-five minutes, I suppose, of random chat. Um but yeah, keep listening, keep watching, and hoping you're enjoying it. Cheers.