Most people have heard of Chay Blyth, the round-the-world yachtsman with a taste for doing it the hard way and an unshakeable conviction that sailing need not be a sport for the elite. The name of Sally Stewart, a resident of Godmanchester for many years, is probably not so familiar. But Sally is one of the 150 or so people whom Chay selected from among 2000 applicants to join the 1996-97 BT Challenge. This is an attempt to describe those ten extraordinary months of exhilaration, exhaustion, joy, pain, fear indeed, the whole range of human emotions as Sally experienced them.

Chay Blyth's first attempt to prove that he could take complete amateurs and teach them to sail round the world was the British Steel Challenge. The success led four years later to the BT Challenge, and this race is now held every four years. British Telecom is the overall race sponsor, but each of the 14 participating boats is also sponsored by a company Toshiba, Group 4, the Heath Group, and Global Teamwork, to mention just a few. Sponsors not only put up the money for the boats, but also lay on corporate entertainments and parties, and in some cases also provide crew accommodation during the stopovers.

Crew selection for the next race begins almost as soon as the last one returns. Chay looks for a good mix of ages (from 21 to 60!) for his 14-man crews. The skipper is always a professional, but the remaining 13 11 core crew and two 'leggers', who only join the crew for one of the six legs of the race are amateurs. Some may have some previous sailing experience, but this is not a prerequisite.Chay reckons he can spot an ideal crew member within 10 minutes of beginning the interview and he seems to get it right, for very few of those who successfully get through that intensely competitive and stringent selection process subsequently drop out.

Once selected, there begins a period of feverish fund-raising and training activity. Sally's place in the team was not confirmed until February 1995, so she had a bare 18 months to prepare. Crew members must put up a substantial sum of money, and in Sally's case, this meant months of letter-writing to try to raise donations from sponsorship most of which were doomed to disappointment sponsored dinners, car boot sales, a sponsored slim by some work colleagues and some generous donations. At the same time, the training had begun. A minimum of three weeks on a challenge boat is compulsory, plus as many additional weeks as the individual can manage to arrange. At this stage, the final crew composition has not been decided. The crews were announced at the Boat Show in January 1996, and at the same time, the skippers and the individual boat sponsors were also drawn by lottery. Sally was assigned to Heath Insured II, sponsored by The Heath Group, and from then on, she trained with her own crew and skipper though they did not have access to their own boat until May. There were also courses to be attended in sea survival, fire fighting, and specialist courses for crew members with specific skills and requirements a course in 'wilderness medicine' for Sally to complement her qualifications as a nurse, and time learning to operate the computers, as she was also the designated communications officer for her crew. The final training requirement, in early July, was for the whole fleet to undertake a qualifying sail in the form of a 5-day Fastnet race. This was an eye-opener for many people, who had begun to be comfortable with sailing together, but who now discovered that living together was a different matter entirely!

At last, the final week before departure came. The crews moved into Ocean Village, and the exhausting business of preparing the boats began. The 14 identical 67-foot steel-hulled Bermuda clippers carry an awesome selection of sails with them to suit every possible wind condition a mainsail, 4 headsails, 3 spinnakers, 1 flanker (an asymmetrical spinnaker, for the non-initiated!), a trysail and two staysails. The crews worked day and night on stowing gear, stocking and packing food, building racks to hold cups and plates in place, working on the sails, marking the sail bags, and a million other jobs. All this was enough to ensure that Sally like everyone else was extremely tired when September 29th dawned with a howling gale and conditions so awful that the support vessels which had turned out to see the Challenge boats off simply couldn't cope. And so began the first leg.

The first leg Southampton to Rio, was the 'learning' leg learning to live together, to sail the boat, to manage the spinnakers (it takes 6 people to get a spinnaker down and stow it successfully), to cope with a 6-hour watch pattern which means you sleep in 4-hour stretches at best. Learning to bake bread, desalinate water, and cook in a galley where nothing keeps still and spag. bol. for 14 lands on the floor without warning, and to endure intense, inescapable, relentless heat. Learning to use the communications systems and keep in touch with family and the outside world though Sally says that those 10 months will always be her 'black hole', when world events took place of which she will always remain in ignorance. Learning to clip yourself to something at all times to minimise the danger of being literally washed overboard by a wave, to pull your cheststraps and your leecloth tight round you in bed so you don't fall out. Learning to cope with tremendous physical and emotional exhaustion, with personal highs and lows, and to share the jobs out fairly and thus avoid the silly niggling arguments which could otherwise destroy a group of people with no-one but each other for company and support for up to 42 days at a stretch. This was also the leg of the night skies unimaginable to those of us who think we see stars in our sky and of the wildlife flying fish, and dolphins, but no albatrosses until the Southern Ocean was reached on leg 2.

After a 3-week stopover in Rio but no real rest, as the boat required major maintenance work the crews set off in a state of considerable apprehension for the first of the notorious Southern Ocean legs 42 gruelling days from Rio, round Cape Horn to Wellington. Not far out of Rio the temperatures started to drop, the seas started to build, and on the 5th day, Heath Insured II was hit by a huge wave which washed all the foredeck crew who were engaged on a sail change at the time off their feet and sent them sprawling to the very end of their strops (the retaining straps on their harnesses). Sally attended to Howard's torn ligaments first, before turning her attention to Andy's cracked ribs and Julia's stress-fractured collar-bone. Two days later, another fall resulted in a badly-sprained ankle. The only 'advantage' of having so many of the crew out of action on the sick list was that when the flanker 'blew' (ripped along the seams), at least they were able to help out by sewing it back together again - by hand, of course. The boat had to spend two days of precious time - this was a race, remember - sailing North to avoid the worst of the storms when one of the brackets supporting the mast broke and the mast started to bend. And then, as they approached Wellington, they hit the tail end of Hurricane Fergus, which produced probably the most disagreeable conditions of the entire race, with the barometer dropping extremely fast, very confused seas which threw the boat mercilessly in all directions, and most of the crew feeling exhausted and unwell.

A 5-week stopover in Wellington provided the opportunity for a brief holiday while the boats were taken out of the water and completely re-rigged. Then it was back to the grindstone of cleaning and re-stowing everything before a relatively uneventful third leg a quick 6-day dash to Sydney with some extremely exciting and close sailing, and a dose of food-poisoning (dodgy kidney beans!) which knocked out half the crew.

The second leg had been pretty tough, but the fourth was plain horrendous. Veteran skippers of that section of the Southern Ocean from Sidney to Cape Town said they had never known such appalling weather, 40 days with 25 of them in winds over 35 knots, and 12 of winds over 60 knots. It can take an hour just to struggle from your bunk and prepare yourself to go on watch in those conditions. The boat suffered dreadfully, with a broken mainsail (hand-mended in 60 hours), headsails and trysails torn, cocoa in the computers (which don't respond well to being washed!) and numerous minor breakages. But the crew, experienced now in such conditions, emerged with only one major injury, and Cape Town was safely reached.

The fifth leg Cape Town to Boston was hot again. Ideal sailing conditions, with the spinnaker flying for 21 days. Andy (cracked ribs on leg 2) saw to it that Sally was kept busy by going down with suspected appendicitis. She crammed him with pain killers and antibiotics, put up a drip, and for 23 nervous hours the boat diverted off course and sped towards St Helena's. Andy was transferred to the care of a nurse, a doctor and a Heath Group agent, who had him flown back to Brize Norton - at which point he made a miraculous recovery and rejoined the crew at Boston!

Boston was a two-and-a-half week stopover, and a sad one in many ways. Suddenly, the end of the great adventure was rushing towards them. The final leg 18 days crossing the Atlantic to Southampton would be daunting enough to frighten most of us, but to the BT Challenge crews, after all that they had been through together, it was really hardly a problem. In the event, after a foggy and becalmed start, it provided some of the most exciting racing they had experienced all year, and a finish which was so thrilling that if Chay had personally stage-managed it, he could not have devised anything more perfect. The skippers were racing the boats up Southampton Water on July 18th as if they were 14-foot dinghies, and 9 of them finished within an hour of each other, two of them divided by just three seconds.

For me to offer any personal comment on Sally's extraordinary achievement would be inappropriate and probably banal. However, I did ask her to pick out some of the absolute highlights. She mentioned the strength of the friendships which were forged, the albatrosses, the changing colours of the sea, the unbelievable stars, the coloured spectrum of a rainbow moving across the water, an iceberg on leg 4, the exhilaration of sitting on the very crest of an immense wave and gazing down into a valley of water . I asked her also if she would recommend it to someone else? She made it clear that this was a very personal choice, and not something which one could think of undertaking without quite phenomenal support from one's family. And would she do it again? "Oh, you're not allowed to", she replied. "When you've been once, that's your lot. Unless, of course, you go as the Skipper .."

Sally Stewart was Interviewed by Nan Taplin

© 1998 Godmanchester Community Association