Meet Lisa McDonald

Nautor Challenge's new skipper and the America's Cup sailor formerly known as Lisa Charles

Lisa McDonald considers herself to be one lucky sailor. After giving up looking for sponsorship for her own Volvo Ocean Race campaign with fellow EF Education crew Katie Pettibone last year, a ready-made project looking for a skipper and crew has fallen into her lap. Despite there being just three months to go until the start and there being all manner of problems still to sort out, the offer of this kind of experience and the challenge has been too good to refuse and Lisa has a grin from ear to ear.

The offer to skipper the second Nautor Challenge boat came from Grant Dalton only a couple of weeks ago, and while much of the detail is still being negotiated, Lisa MacDonald has assigned herself the huge task of finding and selecting an all-female crew for her whirlwind campaign. madforsailing had the chance of talking to Lisa - astonishingly in her first ever official interview - about her life and the Volvo campaign.

Most surprising about Lisa, apart from her lengthy sailing CV, is to learn that despite living in Hamble and having a mild Home Counties accent, she is American. She was born in Rhode Island and her family are split up all over the globe, "That's why sailing is such a fantastic profession for me," she smiles. She grew up and spent most of her school years in different places up and down the Eastern seaboard. When she was 17 or 18 she left the States and apart from brief interludes in 1989 and 1995 when she did the America's Cup campaigns in San Diego, she has not lived there since.

While her official nationality is American, having married one of the UK's most respected ocean and all-round sailors Neal McDonald she is also entitled to British citizenship. "I would be eligible for a British passport but I'm never in the country long enough to get one," she laughs.

Lisa is still more commonly known about the sailing world by her maiden name, Charles, although she is also known as Lisa Charles-McDonald and has spent the last two years trying to change her name. She explains: "Because I went and did the America's Cup a week after I got married, nobody even knew I'd got married at that stage so I thought I might as well start the double barrelled thing just to try and get people used to it. As I meet people, especially with Neal, it's Lisa McDonald. But a lot of people in the industry still know me as Lisa Charles."

Being born and bred in the States her impeccable English accent somehow doesn't seem to fit. "I get accused of having a lot of Australian and New Zealandisms as well," she says. "But I have been working and sailing with international sailors for 14 years now - living with them and surrounded by them. I haven't really spent much time in the States and to be honest I never had a strong accent to start with. I didn't grow up in the west, the Midwest or the south which all have really strong defined accents. The more time I've spent with international sailors I think I've just developed that kind of language, obviously living here I'm surrounded by them 365 days a year. Neal's parents are both teachers - they speak perfect English all the time around me."