Global Clipper race lives up to its name, with Britons in the minority
It may sound like the start of a joke, but the increasing popularity of Sir Robin Knox-Johnston's race has resulted in the proportion of British crew plummeting, with more than half of sailors taking part hailing from the rest of the world.
'Originally it was only the Brits and a few Europeans taking part, but the last race had 43 nationalities' Knox-Johnston, 86, said, before the start of this year's race at the end of next month.
'The international crew were at 53 per cent in the last race, with the Brits down to 47.'
The biennial race, where about 700 amateur sailors pay to race around the world on a 70ft racing yacht, helped by a professional skipper, first launched in 1996.
This year's event, which takes place across eight legs and involves a fleet of 10 Clipper 70 yachts, will have the highest number of international crew so far.
'We've got better known internationally,' Knox-Johnston said. 'We go to these ports around the world and when you get crew from other countries their newspapers send reports back, so that's bloody good advertising.'
Forty-five per cent of the crew aged 40 and under are female this year, while across all ages about 25 per cent of the crew are women.
The biggest group of participants, after the British, is now Americans. 'It used to be Australians, but that's dropped,' said Knox-Johnston, who became the first man to sail non-stop around the world solo in 1969.
The first thing prospective crew have to do is complete four weeks of rigorous sail training on the Solent, where Clipper has its headquarters in Gosport, Hampshire.
It costs about £10,000 to complete the training and take part in one of the race legs. For those wanting to do the full circumnavigation of the globe it costs more than £50,000.
When The Times joined a crew of 12 amateurs completing their first week of training, only two were British. The rest came from Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland, France, Belarus, Germany and the US. It is a steep learning curve as many sign up without any previous sailing experience, having seen an advert at a time when they want to radically change their lives.
Kyle Vacca, 43, a former pilot in the US Air Force who is now an engineer and mission manager at SpaceX, managed to lose his iPhone overboard just before the crew's first man overboard drill, after someone knocked into him on deck.
'It's been a very intensive learning experience,' Vacca said. 'I am used to operating procedures in potentially hazardous environments while being safe and working with a team, so the details are new to me but there are a lot of similarities.'
By the end of the first week they are beginning to get to grips with the vast array of different ropes onboard and bewildering terminology.
'You need to load the halyard on to the pit winch and open the jammer,' Nigel Parry, 60, the skipper of the training boat, shouts into the wind at Alice Morel, 35, a French travel agent living in Queensland, Australia, who has no previous sailing experience.
Then he barks: 'Oliver, are you milkmaid? Then you should be on the other side of the mast.'
Later in the day they attempt their second man overboard drill. Trish McLaughlin, 55, a retired Canadian police officer from Mount Currie, a small town of 5,000 people in British Columbia, is winched over the side to retrieve a floating dummy from the choppy Solent.
'I've always wanted to learn how to sail for my retirement and see the world,' she said, after successfully retrieving the dummy on the third attempt. 'I saw Clipper on my social media feeds and this made me realise I could learn to cross an ocean.'
McLaughlin said the training had been 'a lot'. 'I didn't realise sailing was as technical as it has been,' she said. 'I used to have a water phobia but I conquered that so I could go sailing.
'I did have some people saying, 'Are you crazy?' and 'What are you wasting all your money for?' but it's my investment in my retirement, to be able to meet beautiful people in beautiful places, and see a little bit more of the world.'
The 14th edition of the race sets sail from Portsmouth on August 31, but for those who prefer to keep their feet on dry land, a new five-part series called No Going Back, which follows the teams in the 13th edition, is available on Amazon Prime Video.
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