“Cape Breton” is a name with global recognition, but before the Clipper Round the World Race of ‘09-‘10, word probably didn’t travel this fast. Well, 24 nautical miles an hour fast in a yacht nicknamed “The Big Blue Canoe.”

The seventh around-the-world race is currently in its eighth leg, part of a sprint of 35,000 miles, with stops in fourteen ports of call on five continents. Started by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston in 1995, the race is performed by ten 68 ft yachts from a diverse range of global communities. Including Canada, this year’s participants are Scotland, Jamaica, China, Singapore, Ireland, Finland, England, Australia, and the United States. Each ship has a crew of approximately fifty people, with around eighteen people on board a boat at any given time. Crew rotate in or out at ports of call, with some staying on for the entire global journey.

The only Canadian entry in the race, CAPE BRETON ISLAND recently completed the gruelling seventh leg of the race, which saw competitors’ yachts dismasted and in grave danger of huge seas and storms. Battered and worn, Cape Breton Island cruised into San Francisco Bay in first place, their second first place finish in the race so far. The crew celebrated at an event sponsored by East Coast Connected, Innovacorp, and the Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation.

While CAPE BRETON ISLAND does offer significant media exposure for the island itself and the ship’s many sponsors, it’s also an opportunity to showcase the values of that community in ports of call around the world, something the crew enjoys and takes seriously. Wherever CAPE BRETON ISLAND sets into port, Canadians present in those countries have rallied around it in support at parties and networking events. Cape Bretoners will have a chance to celebrate with the crew in person when it sets into port in Sydney in mid-June.

ECC’s Alex Willis and Ian Finley sat down to speak with crewman Elisa Jenkins and skipper Jan Ridd in April. A Cape Breton native, Jenkins was born in Sydney River and educated at Dalhousie University. The physiotherapist is one of the crewmembers with a strong history of sailing, and is organizing the boat’s Mile for Mile Campaign, raising money for cancer research. Ridd, who hails from Devon, England, came to the sailing profession by a circuitous route, but is now fully embroiled in the exciting world of professional yacht racing. While he says that “I am entering to win,” he couches his expectation with the knowledge that “the biggest achievement for me would be bringing back a crew who say, ‘That’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.’”

Alex Willis: Elisa, congratulations on finishing first in the seventh leg of the race.

Elisa Jenkins: Thank you very much.

AW: Reading about the race online, this leg sounds like it was a wild and a wooly one.

EJ: It was. Some of the strongest waves we’ve had since we left England last September. In the middle of it in the North Pacific, we had the mainsail lashed to the boom, but the crew did a fantastic managing the tough conditions. Coming into San Francisco was great – it was a beautiful arrival, especially seeing all the Maritimers at the Cape Breton event.

AW: What is your position overall in the race?

EJ: We’re third at the moment. The overall race works on a points system, and our place has been calculated based on our seven races so far, including two first place finishes. We still have seven or eight legs to go.

AW: Sounds tense: you’re still in a contending position.

EJ: Yes we are. We need to keep up the momentum and improve our position.

AW: Jan, one of the most difficult things in your role must be managing the diverse personalities on board CAPE BRETON ISLAND. How do you manage this huge diversity of people and professions?

Jan Ridd: I’ve worked for Clipper for ten years, so I’ve learned to deal with diverse crews. I meet with a crew in advance, and get a sense of each of them individually. So I’m able to tailor my “management style,” if you like, to the crew at hand.

It’s important to develop a culture on board, where the crew manage themselves. I try to delegate as much responsibility as possible. I look at it as a success if I have to do very little on board the boat. [laughs] But I want them to get as much out of the experience as possible. Once they feel like they’re all part of a team, and making decisions, it almost manages itself. If you can get that working, it’s a real success.

AW: So, a question for our landlubber readers: what the heck is a “mother watch”? It keeps coming up in the crew’s blog posts.

EJ: “Mother watch” is part of our watch system. We have two watches per day, and every day, one person from each watch is designated “mother.” What the mother has to do is do the cooking and cleaning for 18 people for that day. The reward for this is a full night’s sleep.

AW: [laughs] Really? That’s the reward for doing all that work?

EJ: Yes, that’s right. Everybody takes turns in this position – it usually comes up about once a week.

The crew of CAPE BRETON ISLAND Nova Scotia's Masterpiece celebrates their first place finish in the seventh leg of the race, in San Francisco.

AW: Jan, you’re crewing a ship which is representing Atlantic Canada. You’re from the UK – how does it feel to have this responsibility?

JR: We’re really fortunate – the sponsors from Cape Breton, the Entreprise Cape Breton Corporation, and especially Lauri Taylor, have all been so supportive since day one of our campaign. They’ve all made me feel like I was part of Cape Breton, way back before we even started the race. All the crew feels “adopted” by Cape Breton, and they feel like ambassadors for the place. And everywhere we go in the world, people ask about Cape Breton, and want to go there.

AW: What’s been the longest leg of your journey between ports of call?

EJ: The leg that we just completed, between Qingdao, China to San Francisco. We were at sea for 29 days.

AW: A lot of your journey so far has been what other crew members have called a “winter crossing.” Simon Jones described a winter storm in late March as a case of “there but by the grace of God.” What were your experiences during this storm, Elisa?

EJ: It was definitely the largest seas we’ve seen yet – between 6 and 10 metres. I’d been sailing for a few years prior to this race, and I would say these equalled the biggest storm I’d ever seen, across the Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania. The main difference here is that on those former voyages, I was a crewmember, and we had designated helmsmen who were hired specifically for the crossing. In this case, I was taking the helm, doing all the activities on the boat. It was definitely the most challenging helming we’ve had during the race. Often when you’re on the helm, you’re steering into the waves, but all of a sudden, the whole stern of the boat could be submerged in the water in a matter of seconds. You have to really pay attention to what you’re doing!

We also managed to clock some of the most spectacular speeds during the race – the highest at 24 nautical miles an hour.

AW: One of your fellow crewmembers blogged about the speed of the clipper, actually – about how it is similar to a Concord, or a fighter jet.

EJ: Well, the force of acceleration you feel in a strong wind makes that a good analogy.

AW: The “terrifying” aspect of the race definitely captivated me as a reader of the crew’s blogs, but it’s obviously not like that all the time. Aside from the scary moments, what’s been the most amazing thing you’ve seen on the high seas?

EJ: Well, the boat and the crew, to be honest. We’re so familiar with the boat and its capabilities, and our own crew’s capabilities. So when you’re out there, it actually felt like it was very well under control. Even when we’re in storms, we’re able to keep our small sails up and keep control of the boat. Never once did we lose control, during this last storm.

It’s amazing how quickly you can accommodate yourself to these conditions. When you’re first out there on your first watch, it all seems so huge. But by your third watch, you’ve become accustomed to it.

^{From left to right: Crew members Elisa Jenkins of Cape Breton and Alyson Murray of Halifax.}

AW: Many of the crew have little to no offshore experience, but you bring some familiarity to this race.

EJ: I had my fair share of experiences. Before joining Clipper, I had already sailed about 7,000 miles, and had done passages of over 1,000 miles at a stretch. But being on a boat of this size, going for 20 hour days, definitely surpassed any previous experience I had.

Ian Finley: How were you recruited for the race?

EJ: The Clipper Round the World Race stopped in Sydney, Cape Breton on the last race, two years ago. Being a sailing enthusiast, I wanted to see more, so I went to Sydney to do that. I was under the impression that it was for professional sailors only, but I arrived, spoke to some of the crew who told me of their experiences on the race, and they informed me that anybody could do it as long as they did the training in the UK – three weeks on a boat and a week of navigation and meteorology.

So it became a realistic thing to cross oceans on these boats. I set to work getting an interview with the recruitment manager, David Cusworth, and successfully secured a position for the ’09-’10 race.

AW: Elisa, what’s your relationship with the other yachts’ crews?

EJ: They’re going through the same conditions as we are, so we can identify with them. We look forward to reading the race updates every day, and to see how they are doing.

During the storm in March, there was a block in communications. That usually means there’s been an “incident.” Your worst fear is that there’s a man overboard. So for the whole night, we were up, wondering why there had been a communications blackout. By the next morning, we had heard about the boat California’s dismasting. But we were relieved that everybody was alive, and safe. We could really identify with what the crew was going through – we’d just been through the storm, too. So we knew how lucky we were to have gotten through it OK. Everybody felt a sense of relief at the safety of the crew, but we all felt bad that the ship had been dismasted – they were doing quite well in the race. Times like that, we feel for the other crew. When it comes down to it, we’re having the same experience as them. Once we come into port, we’re all friends.

IF: What types of refits or repair work is CAPE BRETON ISLAND undergoing for the next leg?

EJ: One of our major repairs is to our medium-weight spinnaker. Earlier on in the race, when we were coming around Japan, we had a massive rip across the middle of it. We also have some minor repairs to the main sail, and some general maintenance to the engine, the generator, the water-maker, and replenishing replacement parts. And of course the general cleanup of the entire boat.

AW: Elisa, you’re running something called the “Mile for Mile Program” during your journey. Can you tell us about that?

EJ: I started the Mile for Mile Program when I found out I was chosen for the Clipper Round the World Race. I wanted to do a fundraiser for the Cape Breton Cancer Centre, while fundraising for the race. The idea here is that for each mile that we race, I hoped to raise a dollar – so the aim would be $35,000. (For more information on the program, visit capebretonclipper.com.)

AW: Jan, can you tell our readers how you came to the world of sailing? You seem to have an eclectic professional history?

JR: I was in the UK, working as a professional chef. I “inherited” a 30 ft motorboat from an extravagant friend of mine, who had tried it a couple of times and didn’t like it. So he gave the boat to me.

A friend of mine, he and I would go off in the boat, and we were both married at the time, and if we were half an hour late, our wives would be phoning emergency services, sending out search parties for us. So on the recommendation of our wives, we went off to do an evening course with the World Yachting Association. Through the course, I met some really interesting people, and went on to do the practical sailing exams.

Things kind of snowballed from there. I never really stopped thinking about it as a hobby. I came across Clipper, and started working part time for them. Slowly, my world has started to get taken over by this sport, which is now my profession and my living. It’s been about 15 years total now. You’d think that by now I would have said, “that’s enough of this, time to go back to the real world!” But that hasn’t happened yet. Everything I own is on board CAPE BRETON ISLAND!

AW: What are the biggest challenges coming up in the race?

JR: The next leg is going to be very challenging. The problem with the next leg is that we’re going to be running into very, very light winds. In many ways, this is harder than sailing in heavy winds. We’re going to have to work hard to get into position to find the winds. That means a lot of concentration on the weather maps. The heat is also going to be a challenge on this next leg. The last few legs were cold weather, but now that we’re moving south, it’s going to get warmer. There’s no way to escape the heat – we don’t have an air conditioner aboard the boat – so it can get very uncomfortable.

As far as the overall race is concerned, the big challenge will be keeping the pressure up. My campaign, from day one, I said to the crew, when I first met them, that the actual race is won from San Francisco on. Over half the points available are still ahead of us. This is the part where we push! The secret to winning races is to keep everything in good condition up until the point where you need to push hard. We’re in a good position for this: our boat’s in good order, and we’re looking forward to improving our placement.