Race 10 - Pre-race
Crew Diary - Homeward Bound
20 March

Homeward Bound

Blimey, where to begin. First, a warning that the carefree, jovial writer on all things toilet and eating crewmates related is dead. Finished. Kaput. Sure, my blogs will still contain a heavy dose of self-effacement, but from now on it will be entirely without irony. John Dillon was previously the man to read if you wanted unbridled negativity – one of his blogs was deemed so depressing that it was never published and was later destroyed in a controlled explosion. Well, his oeuvre is now positively, well, positive when compared to my own. Yep, strap in and prepare for some seriously depressing, wallowing in my own misery dirge.

I’m fully aware that the last two years have been dire for pretty much everyone – exceptions being PPE middlemen, Jeff Bezos and the resident DJ at Number 10. The collective trauma will be hard to process, although I’m sure we’ll get there one day. So whilst my woes don’t come remotely close to many others, I can only fully comment on my experiences and hope it’s cathartic as opposed to completely unnecessary introspection.

I’ve always maintained that taking part in the Clipper Round The World Yacht Race is some of the best personal development training you can receive. You learn so much about yourself, dealing with others, working as part of a high performing team. What a journey to be on. But just like it’s not a good idea to turn off your phone whilst it’s installing updates, it’s definitely not a good idea to abruptly halt proceedings in the middle of a personal odyssey.

Dumped back into the real world I felt as if I’d been out of my chair when the music stopped. Whilst others hunkered down into working from home, I was unceremoniously gaslighted and then let go by my previous employer. My relationship with my partner sadly broke down, I fell out with one of my best friends, I essentially lived out of a suitcase for 18 months, relying on the kindness of friends and family – something for which I’ll always be incredibly grateful. Eventually moving home I discovered my tenants had converted my flat into a live-in petri dish. We’ll never know if the mould growing up the walls was in fact a cure for cancer, but I do know it was the perfect straw to break the camel’s back that was the scintilla of mental health I had left.

It's been a little up and down since then, breakthroughs followed by setbacks, all the while the spectre of the race moving in and out of focus. I know it’s billed as the Race of Your Life, I just never knew how much of my actual life it would take up. Given the way things have gone, I of course wish I’d never signed up to do this sodding thing in the first place. But I did, and so the decision has been whether to call it a day and try to take some sort of lesson from the experience, or to go back and hope that the thing that killed me can be the defibrillator to bring me back to life. A tough decision that feels somewhat lose-lose, but I’ve evidently tried to lean in once more and finish what I started all those years and a different world ago.

So here we are again in Subic Bay! Listen, I really love the Philippines and the Filipino people, but if a single atom of my remains washes up here in 100,000 years time it will be entirely too soon. Let’s sail away from this place. Sail back to joy, to self-worth, to a sense of purpose, to future blogs that aren’t prefaced with contact details for the Samaritans. Let’s sail home.