Some of the other boats did everything exactly the same way, from start to finish. On our boat, there wasn't a single operation at the end of the race that we did the same way as in the beginning. You were learning, changing, and evolving all the time. If you weren't, you were dead.
More Quotes from Simon Walker:
There's a watch change at two in the morning, ... So seven people who have been on deck for four hours in immense waves and windchill get to go down below. They're covered in sleet. They're bruised. They're exhausted. And they've got four hours before they're due back on deck. They clamber out of their dry suits. They lay out their moldy sleeping bags on the bunks on the high side of the boat, and they get in. They've already used up 30 minutes. After another half hour, the wind shifts, and the guys on deck need to tack the boat. That means the guys down below have to wake up, grab their sleeping bags, walk across the boat, and lay out on the other side. Now they've lost even more sleep.Simon Walker
We were out there in the Southern Ocean, feeling very insignificant in a big part of the planet, ... At any minute, another storm would sweep in. We hatched a plan Spike and I would climb up and jury-rig the fitting. As we started the climb, I told the crew that they must helm the yacht very carefully on the opposite tack, as the rigging was only holding up one side of the mast. If the helmsman made a mistake while we were up on the mast, we'd crash down over the side with the entire rig on top of us.
Simon Walker
Watch in, watch out, for 30,000 miles, the Wave Warriors hot bunked. If I had come up with this idea in the middle of the race, I could have been the most charismatic leader in the world, and I never would have gotten them to agree to it, ... It all goes back nine months, to when we sat in that house in Wales. After that, we didn't talk about it -- we did it. That was our life.
Simon Walker
The first goal Pass the tenth-place boat, which was five miles ahead of the Toshiba Wave Warrior, within the next 12 hours. The crew members did it. Then, they overtook the next boat and the one after that. Some 1,000 miles later, the Wave Warrior stormed into Boston in third place. The race was all about learning The team that learned the fastest would win, ... My ambition was for the crew to learn so well that they wouldn't need me. I really feel that a leader's goal should be to make himself redundant.
Simon Walker
No one was getting the whole picture, thank God, ... But confiding in each of them was the only way for me to handle the loneliness of command, which is very, very real.
Simon Walker
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