Will Oxley

You're generally pretty exhausted.

And when that

The first rays of the sun start to appear and then finally I never tire of a beautiful sunrise.

Yes, I remember this very, very clearly.

So it was about September 1998, and I went into the newsagents and picked up a copy of Yachting World magazine.

And I was there with my now wife, and she remembers it quite clearly as well.

And I looked at this ad in the back of the magazine before I bought it, and it said...

the world's toughest yacht race skippers wanted.

And I read through the ad and I said, Sue, this looks interesting.

And she just looked at me and said...

Oh, yeah, that does look interesting.

And so I bought the magazine.

I went home, looked at it in detail, and they were essentially looking for skippers to lead a team of amateurs in a round-the-world race called the BT Global Challenge.

The idea of a normal round the world race is that as the sailors of old did, you make use of the prevailing currents and winds.

So the traditional way, for example, to get from the United Kingdom to Australia is to come down through the Atlantic Ocean to stick to the west side of the Atlantic Ocean, because you make use of the high pressure, which means you go downwind, you pop into the Southern Ocean.

The strong westerly winds push you downwind to Australia.

And then often they would return by continuing east and going around Cape Horn and going back up through the Atlantic.

So that's what's known as a traditional route.

It does sound a sensible way to sail.

But there was a gentleman named Che Blythe, now Sir Che Blythe, who was an English Marines, military guy, and he didn't know much about sailing, but he decided he wanted to sail around the world and he decided that he should go the wrong way around the world.