ADVENTURE ATLANTIC CHALLENGES WITH GRETA

Fifty-knot squalls, lightning and wind holes meant crossing the Atlantic with climate activist Greta Thunberg was far from plain sailing for Nikki Henderson

- Nikki Henderson

There is a feeling on board that we are about to achieve something special. We have made the impossible possible,’ I blogged, when we were two days out of Lisbon.

Sailing across the Atlantic is a significant milestone for any sailor. Delivering Greta Thunberg across the North Atlantic in November 2019 was inevitably going to be tough, especially considering the time of year. Then consider the complex crew make up, the unfamiliar boat, the time constraints and the celebrity passenger – and you start to understand why I had described it as something of an ‘impossible’ mission.

On 7 November 2019 Riley Whitelum, who with his partner Elayna Carausu created the La Vagabond YouTube channel, texted me with the message: ‘Nikki meet Greta. We need a skipper to help us get from the USA to Europe, pronto!’ ‘Wow! What an opportunity; what an adventure,’ I thought. And then the enormity of what was being asked set in.

Just three weeks later we tied up in Lisbon. Somehow, we had managed to overcome every obstacle in our way. Up against a deadline, we had prepared La Vagabonde for sea in five days and completed the passage in just 19. From a group of disparate strangers, we became a team. We safely navigated a tropical storm, lightning, wind holes, cold fronts, 50-knot squalls and 8m seas. A broken furling line, a rogue liferaft, hampered steering cables and malfunctioning instruments were also resolved on route. For any crew, these challenges would have been testing.

We achieved it with two sailors, a competent crew and mum, two passengers – one of whom was Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year– and of course, 11-month-old baby Lenny. This was an exceptional experience on many levels.