“Someone had to show me it was possible.”

As a young boy I once took a train, one hour each way, just to see and touch a yacht called Flyer. It belonged to Conny van Rietschoten, the only skipper ever to win the Whitbread Round the World Race twice. I'd never met him, but Conny was the living proof that something extraordinary was actually possible. Not a hero on a pedestal. Just someone who'd done the thing and shown it could be done. That single afternoon set the direction for most of what followed.

I grew up in the Netherlands, on the water, a lake at first, where curiosity mattered more than results. As a boy I learned to read the weather rather than fight it, and that way of paying attention never left.

Offshore and ocean racing came later. It leaves no room for ego. Long days at sea, making judgement calls in constantly changing conditions, taught me that the hardest moments in any journey are rarely about the problem in front of you. They're about what happens to people when the problem doesn't go away quickly enough, when the will to keep going gets tested hardest, and giving up starts to look reasonable. I know that feeling from the inside. Every time, the choice was the same: stay focused, hold the direction, finish. Giving up was simply never the answer.

In 2003 my team and I won our class in the Transatlantic Cape to Rio Ocean Race after twenty days at sea. Three years later we returned with a yacht I had developed and built, won the race overall in sixteen days and set the course record for yachts under 40 feet.

I have lived in six countries: the Netherlands, South Africa, Belgium, France, Spain and now the Isle of Man. Every place changed the way I looked at the world. I learned from the people around me, from different cultures and different ways of living, eating, working and relating to each other. I started to realise that many things I once thought were simply normal were really just the way I happened to grow up. Living in different places broadened my horizon, literally and in almost every other sense. After all those years and all those places, the Isle of Man has become home.