“Someone had to show me it was possible.”

As a young boy, I once took a train, an hour each way, just to see and touch a yacht called Flyer. She belonged to Conny van Rietschoten, the only skipper ever to win the Whitbread Round the World Race twice. I never met him. But standing next to his yacht, I understood that something extraordinary was possible, not because he was a hero on a pedestal, but because he was a man who had simply done it. I thought about that afternoon for years.

I grew up in the Netherlands, surrounded by water, starting on a lake where curiosity mattered more than results. There I learned to read the weather rather than fight it, and I still work that way.

Over the years I have lived in six countries: the Netherlands, South Africa, Belgium, France, Spain and now the Isle of Man. Each one showed me that much of what I had always considered normal was simply the way I had grown up.

Offshore and ocean racing came later, and the ocean leaves little room for ego.

In 2003 we raced from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro on a yacht called Madiba, Nelson Mandela’s clan name. It is not a name you simply take, and it took some time before we were allowed to carry it. Every cent of our sponsorship went to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, and in December 2002, a few weeks before the start, I handed the cheque to the man whose name we carried.

I was young, and I had never met anyone like him: a man who had been through more than I ever will, and who was still so strong, so humble, so gentle and so wise.

Twenty days after leaving Cape Town, we were the first 42 footer across the line and second overall on handicap. Three years later we crossed the South Atlantic again, on a yacht I had developed and built, and won the race overall in sixteen days. Others had done it before us, and others have done it since.

That yacht was the first step towards building and developing high performance sailing yachts for a living.