In at the deep end

Well known for her ocean rowing, but a newbie sailor, Debra Searle tells us of her ambitious record breaking plans

This article follows on from our interview with Dee Caffari yesterday...

If you live in the UK then the name Debra Veal is one you will almost certainly have heard of following the extraordinary tale of her and her then husband's entry in Challenge Business' Atlantic Rowing Race in 2001. Two weeks into the voyage husband Andrew developed an overwhelming fear of the ocean and had to be taken off, leaving wife Debra to complete the passage from Tenerife to Barbados alone in a time of 111 days. This unusual tale gained Debra Veal many national newspaper column inches at the time, although perhaps more due to do her husband bailing from the voyage rather than the voyage itself.

Since then Debra Searle, as she is now called, has become something of a celebrity in the UK and has for example competed as part of the first British team in the longest canoe race in the world down Canada's Yukon River, the team's progress filmed by the BBC for their Extreme Lives series.

In much the same way as Ellen MacArthur was wooed into sailing when she was young by reading accounts such as Sir Robin Knox-Johnston's first non-stop round the world voyage, so Searle too was captivated in this way, but by adventurers. "From 14 at school, I did my Gold Duke of Edinburgh Awards and from then on I was totally transfixed on going into expeditions. Then I read Randolph Fiennes’ book and that kind of sealed it," she says. "And I was a bit obsessed by Chris Bonnington and all these explorers and climbers - all very odd for a teenage girl."

She, like Dee Caffari, did a degree in Outdoor Adventure Education, learning mountain leadership, canoeing, kayaking as part of her degree course and going on more and more expeditions. Even then she was getting a sense that all the good rivers had been run and all the good mountains climbed. "Now if you have enough money you can get up to the top of Everest. So I was looking for a different type of challenge and Hayley my twin sister, was working for the Challenge Business, running Challenge Adventure Sailing for Chay. And that was around the time when they launched the Atlantic Rowing Race, which was how that came about."

It was at the end of the Rowing Race in 2002 that Chay Blyth mooted the idea of her attempting to become the first woman ever to sail non-stop around the world the wrong way. Despite not being a sailor Searle says she was really excited by the prospect but at the time she just wanted to get home and spend time with her family. However the seed had been sown.

"It kept on eating away at me and I kept on thinking about this challenge," she says and by last year had made up her mind that she was going to do it. Searle continues: "About a week later I went to the Southampton Boat Show and I was at the lunchtime launch and found myself sitting next to Andrew Pindar. I had never met him before but I knew him from Pindar and Emma Richards."

The rest, as they say, is history. "I didn’t tell Andrew that was what I was hoping to do. But he is such an astute entrepreneur, within a week he’d worked it all out and he sent me a text message saying ‘do you want to sail around the world the wrong way?’ And it was like 'how do I answer that? Yes?' So we started formulating a plan and it is amazing what has happened since then. We had hoped that Chay would get involved with our little project, but it turns out he wanted one of his own. Then we got Offshore Challenges involved with the project management and all of a sudden now it has gone on to a very large scale and we are looking to try and achieve big things on the media front and the interaction with the general public as Ellen has."

As a first step Searle was packed off to get some sailing time in as a kind of mutual test for Pindar and herself. In a typically 'in at the deep end' approach, her first sailing of any note was upwind through the Southern Ocean on board Pindar's yacht in the Global Challenge. "I spent the whole time down in the Southern Ocean thinking ‘I so wish I was here on my own’. So that was great to go back to Andrew and go ‘yup, we’re on. I definitely feel I can do this, I can go there alone.” That was a great confidence booster to both of us."

From there they started looking for a boat and it was through the influence of Pindar's Transat skipper Mike Sanderson that they ended up acquiring the former Team News Corp Volvo Ocean 60, with a view to converting her from a boat to be sailed at 100% by a team of 13 to one suitable for sailing around the world the wrong way singlehanded and less efficiently.

"We got the Volvo 60 partly with the idea in mind that with the way the sailing world is, it is impossible to keep these things quiet and if someone was going to go out and beat me to the record then we wanted to make sure we had a fast boat to go in so that we could go and break the record shortly afterwards."

They talked to the Farr office and North Sails about the possible conversion but the prospect of working with Neal Graham, was what sealed the deal with Offshore Challenges says Searle. Offshore Challenge's Technical Manager has been the technical brains behind numerous Whitbread/Volvo projects from Lawrie Smith's Rothmans and, erm, Fortuna, to Assa Abloy and is a man who relishes a project like turning a VO60 into a vessel to be sailed solo upwind round the world.

As with Caffari's boat, the latest Pindar will have to go through much modification work to make her suitable for singlehanding. There are the basics such as fitting an autopilot, furling sails and releading all sail controls so they run back to the cockpit, but the mods to the VO60 will have to be more far-reaching. The rig is likely to be cut down dramatically and will be made bulletproof with swept-back spreaders and possibly a fixed backstay. This will also require structural work to be carried out down below, where the layout will also be dramatically altered. "It is a big cavernous space at the moment and there is a long way to fall when it is heeled over," says Searle. "So we are going to refit out the middle of the boat so that I can’t fall and possibly move the nav station forwards so that I can see up through the hatch."

They have also been considering ways to make the shallow Volvo-style cockpit safer for a singlehander by deepening it, but this may not happen. "We are looking at all kinds of ways to make it bullet proof. Even if it means dropping the boat down to 60% of its usual speed, the idea is to get around safely. There is a big emphasis on safety all the time with all our discussions."

Searle will be heavily involved with the work on the boat as she realises that this will be a good way to get to know her steed. Meanwhile there is the no small issue of turning herself into a singlehanded offshore sailor. To learn the wide variety of skills necessary to equip her for this, Searle is being fast tracked through a program developed by Mark Turner and UKSA. It was Turner, it should be remembered, who sat down with Ellen as they were planning her highly successful 2000-1 Vendee Globe attempt and developed a training program involving the study of sleep deprivation with world expert 'Dr Sleep' aka Claudio Stampi, boat on boat racing with Paul Brotherton, Open 60 sailing with Yves Parlier, meteorology with Jean-Yves Bernot, etc. While Ellen at this time already had considerable experience and sea time logged, with Searle it will be more a case of starting from kindergarden rather than secondary school. But this aspect of what she is doing is potentially one of the attractions of her campaign and it is easy to imagine the reality TV-style programs that will come from it....'we took a singlehanded ocean rower and over the course of a year turned her into singlehanded round the world the wrong way sailor...'

While UKSA are rapidly pushing Searle through a key selection of their numerous courses, from Yacht Master (she sat the theory last weekend) to selected parts of the Yacht Master Ocean course to fixing watermakers/diesel generators, etc - all backed up by the time she spends helping with the refit of her boat - so Turner is setting up her singlehanded training that is likely to include time on a Mini and/or a Figaro in the new year. "This will build up to the stage where I can then start taking the Volvo 60 out on my own and then doing transatlantics with two on board and just with me on for the way back, etc," continues Searle.

In addition she also has the advice of Pindar's original girl Emma Richards, while Loz Marriott, the Pindar Global Challenge skipper is now working full time on the project and is her training skipper. "I am loving the training and am even more excited about what might come because we have potential races for me to take part in as well to help me fast track my experience."

One aspect of the voyage Searle is familiar with is the soliditude having spent almost 100 days at sea on her own during her transatlantic row. "With the rowing, I found the peace and tranquility out there, like I have never found anywhere on land or up a mountain or on a river. I was just so overwhelmed by the whole beauty of it. It is something I certainly think of often and I wish I was back out there now. I also think that having not set out to row solo and not ever really having planned to do solo expeditions I feel quite fortunate in the way that that happened, because I certainly never thought I had the strength to do something like that on my own - it was only because of the circumstances that I had to. Now I have done, it is such a different form of challenge: Not having anyone to fall back on other than people at the end of a phone, completely puts it on a different level. It is so much harder, so much more challenging. And that is a challenge I’d really like to rise to."

In terms of a departure date for her westabout solo round the world record, this will be sometime in the autumn of 2006, depending upon when her weather routers advise her to leave.

Having sailing on a 72ft Challenge yacht full crewed upwind through the Southern Ocean, Searle has some idea of what she is up against. She is also well aware of the case of Jean-Luc van den Heede, the current outright non-stop westabout solo record holder who only succeeded in getting the record after five attempts. "We have gone into this all thinking and feeling that it might be two to three attempts before we crack this and we are determined to be the fastest, so it could take some time. I think it is quite a long term process we are looking at. And likewise for Dee [Caffari], although she is going in a big solid boat, it only takes one thing to break... In a way it would be fantastic if she ended up going next year for some reason. It would be brilliant to have two of us going round at the same time, battling it out. I know Dee quite well from the Global Challenge, and she is such a brilliant girl and we get on well together, I think we’d have a great laugh if we were just battling it out out there, but we’ll see what happens."