My story Sailing solo

In 2017 Lisa Blair became the first woman to sail solo around Antarctica. She nearly didn’t live to tell the tale. But those scrapes with death gave her the courage to make a second solo circumnavigation, and this time she broke the world record.

I didn’t start sailing until I was 25. It was my last year at Southern Cross University. I got a job as the cook and the cleaner on a charter yacht in the Whitsundays and started sailing from there.

Within a few weeks I was looking at how I could do more sailing, not really realising that it could become a career path or that I would end up as an adventurer. I ended up getting a position as a crew on a friend’s boat. We spent three months sailing to Hawaii on a little 40-foot steel boat. It was my first standing watch while the boat was sailing through the nighttime, and we had whales near the boat. You’ve just got stars above you. It’s like this magic world that I didn’t really know existed.

My mum’s partner, John, started lending me all these books – Robin Knox-Johnston talking about his solo circumnavigation around the world – all these incredible solo sailors. My mind was just like, “Oh, this would be awesome to do”.

I couldn’t shake the idea of sailing around Antarctica. It just kind of needled me in the back of my mind.

In 2017, I set out on board my yacht, Climate Action Now, to become the first woman to sail solo around Antarctica and it would be an understatement to say that not everything went according to plan.

The most frightening moment came 72 days into the journey. By then, I had sailed south from Australia down below Tassie, below New Zealand, below South America. I was just passing the bottom of South Africa when the mast snapped in a storm.