Will Oxley

And I found it.

to be on the whole a positive experience rather than a negative experience.

And that sounds strange, but those of us that have been in terrible scrapes and got out of them, well, not necessarily regarded as a bad experience.

And so this just indicated to me that perhaps this race wasn't such a silly idea.

So it turned out that 187 people applied from all around the world to be skippers in this yacht race.

And so I sent all the paperwork in and essentially we were largely doing psychometric testing.

And so there was a whole lot of things they would get us to do.

Some of them would, they would create a stressful environment and then you would be given a short period of time to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

generally totally unrelated to sailing.

Yeah, so that was an interesting experience in itself.

So each boat had 18 people on board, so there were 17 amateurs.

And essentially at that point, almost like they drew them out of a hat, you were told who your sponsor was and you were given a folder with your crew.

Now, they tried to even it out across boats.

So my crew raged in age from 19 to late 60s and a mixture of males and females.

You then had from January to September when the race started to mould them into a crew.

And you had maybe...

20, 25 days with them over that period of time because, of course, all of these people were madly trying to raise money so they could afford to come and go on this mad-capped adventure.

Well, I had a good friend who ran a team development company, actually, and he was working with big business.

I got him involved.

And so we also did a lot of team development work where we tried to understand what made everyone tick in the team.