Hi, my name's Tracy Edwards and I skippered the first all female crew in the Whitbread round the world race.
It always makes me laugh when people say 'sailing career'.
Because its been more of a jumbled mess of moving from one project to another.
I was expelled form school when I was 15 years old. And my long suffering mother thought it would be a good idea for me to go backpacking around Europe.
Which at the age of 16, as I was at the time, I think was very brave of her but she knew I needed to go and find whatever it is I was looking for after troubled teenage years.
Ended up working in a bar in Greece, a guy came in one night and said would you like to be a stewardess on my charter yacht and I said yeah.
I was 17 at the time. And then was so lucky, I felt that id really found my path as i stumbled across sailing and knew within a few days that this was what i wanted to do for the rest of my life.
So by the time I was 21, I had just started doing a bit of racing and finding out what that scene was all about.
And then ended up doing the 85-86 Whitbread round the world race on a boat called Atlantic Privateer with 17 Pirates.
Sailing around the world on Atlantic Privateer was an experience. I didn't have that much, well i had no ocean racing experience. I had a lot of ocean miles under my belt with a lot of deliveries and cruising.
But this was a whole new kettle of fish. and very different form the small boat around the buoys racing that I'd done in Sardinia and the Swan worlds and all those other things.
The guys did not appreciate having me on the boat to start with. Even though they were friends, they were very clear that we're not going to be the only professional ocean racing maxi with a girl on board.
But I wangled my way onto the boat and i spent the first leg trying to prove myself. That i wasn't going to do something stupid or fall over the side.
And the cooking was dreadful because freeze dried food was dreadful then. There was nothing I could do about it.
But what happened during the race was, when we won the second leg coming into New Zealand and beat NZI Enterprise by 7 minutes after a really close match race down the coast of New Zealand, closest finish at that time, I think everyone felt that I had earned my place on board and i began to be accepted a lot more.
So as we were getting to the finish of the 85-86 race I knew that there were 200 people in this race and we'd all become very close and only 4 girls.
Which just seemed crazy because this was just so much fun.
And i remember thinking that even thought the guys had accepted me on Atlantic Privateer, it was very much on a one off basis.
So yeah, "ok you can sail around the world but girls cant really". I thought well we're not going to get anywhere with getting girls on boats and getting out there
and enjoying this fantastic racing, unless we change something. So I came up with the idea of an all female crew, really to prove once and for all
that girls can sail around the world and we can sail just as well as the guys and of course this is a marathon not a sprint so the whole strength issue is not so important.
Having then announced it, the reaction was a little bit different from the yachting press and various other great ocean racing sailors.
Who took the mickey out of me, laughed at me and some pretty horrendous stuff in the press, the yachting press
we're all good mates now though.
And the shocking thing is when i look back now and it was kind of accepted and I didn't really think anything of it. When Bob Fisher wrote a tin full of tarts, we just went 'ah well'.
Where as of course now you'd never get away with saying that so those kind of things have changed in the years since.
The disadvantage for us is of course that people thought we couldn't do it. So we were so over prepared, the training we put in, everything we did to prove once and for all that women could do this.
And we felt very strongly that if we didn't do it this time the next all female crew would have an even bigger hurdle to climb.
So, we threw our hearts and souls into it and went off and did the Whitbread with various yachting press in a bar taking bets on how far we'd get.
No one thought we'd get to the end of the first leg. We did. We came 3rd.
Which we were gutted about. Everyone else was really excited that we were still alive.
And then off into the southern ocean on the second leg we were probably the most determined we'd ever been to do anything.
We knew this was our leg. Maidens a heavy boat and we were very set us for nasty weather, we were very far south, I think the furthest south of the whole fleet.
And we wont the leg coming into Australia. Coming into freemantle first, collective jaws dropped. Which made us very happy.
People said it was a fluke so we knew we had to win the next leg.
Which was a short leg. 3400 miles from Freemantle to Auckland
Much more of a tactical leg, which is not my area, navigation is my thing. But 2 great tacticians on board, 3 actually.
We had Michelle, Dawn and Vicky. We came 1st coming in to New Zealand so at half way in the race we were leading by 18 hours in our class.
The scary moment for me was going up past the Falkland islands where I really thought there might be a change that we would sink.
We couldn't find where the water was pouring into the boat. By the time we discovered what was going on the generator had been incapacitated.
We couldn't charge the batteries. The bilge pumps failed. The saying 'there is no bilge pump like a bucket in the hands of a frightened sailor'. Very true!
So we were literally bailing out with buckets. We had the floor boards up we were desperately looking for where this water was coming in. We didn't know then that it was coming in through the mast. Were we'd cracked the mast.
We didn't know that then. And I do remember thinking 'I'm the skipper, everyone's looking at me and they're looking at my expression' so I'm like 'oh this is fine, we'll find the leak don't worry about it'. And inside I'm going 'Ahhhh I think we might die'.
And I remember a conversation on the deck with Sal. Because, I cant believe I'm going to say this, but in the days before health and safety gone mad, we had the life rafts in lockers
in the forward cockpits and to get them out you had to take the grinder handles off.
So I don't know how long that would've taken because we never tried it.
We didn't practice before we left. I remember looking at Sal and going 'how long do you think it would take to get the life rafts out?'.
And she went 'I'll go and find out very quietly' so she just went and did a little bit of research.
Luckily we never had to we realised that we could empty the boat out much more effectively when we were on starboard.
So we literally limped up to Uruguay. But that moment of feeling very mortal and really truly understanding the feeling that comes before you think something disastrous might happen, I've never felt that again in my entire life.
I tend to put myself under a lot of pressure. I mostly do it because I am worried that I'm not good enough.
I have a really bad case of impostor syndrome. But what I know I do have is the best team.
A piece of advice given to me many years ago, was always make sure that you're the least experienced person in the team when you look around the room you want to be thinking they're all smarter than me, they're all better than me.
So i made a really point of making sure, because as a sailor, I'm not a great sailor, I think I'm a good navigator and that's my passion.
but I chose a team who could all sail rings around me and I did that on purpose. Because i think what I'm probably good at is managing a team and keeping them going and motivated.
So my insecurities as a skipper were quite debilitating at some points and it was really only because i had a team around me who didn't capitalise on that
which they could've done. They just wanted to make sure that i was ok, that I felt good about what i was doing and we did learn this process together and we made it up as we went along.
But I never intended skipper maiden. That's the thing I was just going to put the project together and find a skipper.
And then i couldn't find a skipper. King Hussein said to me 'well you'll have to do it
You're kind of the skipper anyway, so just get on with it'
So I kind of ended up in a role I didn't expect, I was just going to be the navigator but you know when you've got a great team
along side you, you can make it happen. They did allow me to learn on the job.
Which is pretty extraordinary. By the time we got to the finish on the 2nd of May which was May day bank holiday 1990, we knew we were going to finish in second place over all.
Which was still an amazing achievement, we thought. And at that point as well we'd realised there was a much bigger picture here.
That we had done so much more than anyone had ever thought we could do.
We hadn't done as much as we thought we could do but it's a race and things happen.
Coming into Southampton at the finish was just indescribable.
Howard Gibbons, our project manager, kind of said 'there was a little bit of interest in the UK, there's a couples of people that might think this is pretty cool'
So we're like 'okay'. We knew there was a boat with our family and friends coming out. That was great and were expecting that.
Beautiful sunrise, ghosting into towards the needles. Very quiet, very calm.
Really the last few moments on the boat where we realised this was nearly over and we would all soon be having to leave each other.
Which was sad. So reflective moments. Then we saw a boat come out and another one and another one and i think it was Sal who said ah there must be a regatta on today.
And one boat turned round and came along side us and then the next one did.
One of them had some really young children just out sailing on the Solent. And i remember Sal saying to them 'are you here to follow us?'
And they were like 'Yes!' and more people turning round and it became bigger and more and i get goosebumps just thinking about it.
And then our families came out on their boat and this press boat, it was sort of leaning over to one side, quite alarming, people throwing flowers as us.
People trying to give us food because they knew we were starving as wed run out of food the week before but of course we couldn't accept any outside help until we got to the finish line.
Just the overwhelming sense of achievement and all these people appreciating what we'd done and I know we were an international crew but i felt very British that day.
And this extraordinary flotilla going up the water to the point where we were like 'don't want to hit anyone'
We were giving instructions to people. 'We're going to tack/jibe'. Putting that spinnaker up, that beautiful Jordan spinnaker up
and those photographs of us with all the boats and just amazing! And then coming round the corner I remember Michelle gave me the wheel
after we'd crossed the finishing line, as the gun went off every horn in the harbour, every ships horn, went off, all the yachts around us.
When i look at the footage back now you can see us all sort of doing that, and that's why.
so i took the wheel and we came into Ocean Village and it was just this roar met us and it was literally woah. People chanting, simply the best playing and that was extraordinary.
I remember my only thought at the time was thought, if I'm ever going to crash the boat its going to be now.
Just imagine the pictures, not a ding all the way round. But no, that was amazing and what was truly extraordinary to me was the genuine sense of warmth and joy for us and it really felt to me as if everyone was saying, you know it was a real vindication for everything we'd been through to get tot that point.