Dame Ellen MacArthur is a huge inspiration and roll model to me. She is a retired English sailor from Derbyshire now based in the Isle of Wight. She was a record breaking, solo, long-distance yachtswoman who set up the Ellen MacArthur Trust. I have been so incredibly fortunate to have sailed with her on a number of Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust trips. I have come to know her story through asking questions and reading her books.
I knew that in 2001 she sailed in the Vendee Globe. One moment in particular stands out for me when she was sailing in the Southern Ocean.
After an uneasy night trying to get some sleep, with the wind getting stronger, she got up and decided to wipe the condensation off the windows. She got an almighty shock. After cleaning the last window, instead of seeing a grey sky she saw ice! With adrenalin running through her blood she ran out of the hatch and discovered a 40-foot high melting iceberg, which she missed by 20 feet! She explained she felt sick and shaken on the inside.
In 2002, my ‘iceberg’ moment happened. I was six years old. Most 6 year olds live blissfully unaware of the fragility of life and so they should. I was diagnosed with an astrocytoma brain tumour and in the blink of an eye, I had to come to terms with the fact that I could die.
No one came out with it directly. No one said ‘this is really serious and you might die’ but even so, I could feel it in the air around me like the way you feel a storm is coming on a beautiful summers evening. My doctors were amazing but somehow I felt there was something different about the way they treated me. It wasn’t something I could describe in words, but I could sense it even though I was so young.
I was afraid at first as I didn’t understand this elephant in the room. I could feel it but not touch, see but not see. People spoke about it without directly speaking about IT, their worst fears. I heard fragments of conversations from concerned people trying to protect me but needing to discuss the situation. I can’t pinpoint the moment when I knew. It just crept up on me. Strangely, just as it crept up on me, so too did this amazing human trait to somehow accept the fear that I could die. Don’t get me wrong! I was afraid but somehow, I also accepted the fear, and in accepting my fear, I was also able to control it a little.
On my first Trust trip in 2010 age 14, I saw people in the marina climbing the mast in what looked like a giant orange nappy. I know now it as the Bosuns Chair. As Ellen worked side by side with us, she briefly talked about how she too had once had to climb the mast. After reading her book ‘Taking on the World,’ unlike the boats before us in the relatively calm and safe waters of the English coast, her boat was keeled over and was lying on its side almost horizontally due to a storm. Though this was bad in itself, what was to come was far worse. Due to a broken part up the mast, it prevented her getting the main sail down so in a brief lull and with the boat now upright, she had to climb the mast.
She explains how the conditions were horrendous with 40 knots of wind and if the wind rose anymore she would need to get her main sail down. She mentioned that going up in those conditions just didn’t bear thinking about, physically having to pull yourself up, getting smashed against the mast, trying to hold on as every high wave hit, when all the boat wanted was to throw her off. It completely exploded my brain and I could only imagine the fear and adrenalin she must have felt. Somehow, I could relate to those feelings in the battles that I had faced for the last eight years – having to emotionally and spiritually pull myself up; try to hold on to hope as every wave of treatment threatened to take all my energy and throw it into the raging sea around me.
Several years later and a number of trips completed in 2014 I did my fast track Instructor course in Greece. As part of this, I was doing my RYA Day Skipper qualification. Intrigued about what it would be like and inspired by what I had read, I really wanted to climb that mast. To my amazement, the skipper let me! I thought back to the time when MacArthur had faced the bosuns chair herself in such perilous conditions and in that moment, it only brought forward an empathy and awe for her. She faced such an enormous challenge alone and here I was struggling to climb the mast on the flat Mediterranean Sea.
People have said to me “I don’t know how you got through it all.” The answer is, some hidden instinct kicks in and you begin to think logically rather than emotionally in order to get through the ordeal. Ellen MacArthur didn’t have the privilege of feeling afraid when she had to go up that mast. It was face it head on and tackle the challenge, or risk everything.
Don’t let fear determine what you do. If you have a passion, a dream, a goal, go for it!