Winning second place in the nearly year-long Clipper Round The World yacht race, skipper Gavin Rees from Abergavenny tells Julia Bottoms about navigating choppy waters and staying on course.
The past year of Gavin Rees’ life feels like an apt modern-day enactment of this summer’s new Odyssey film, albeit without the Cyclopes or Sirens. The 47-year-old Rees, from Abergavenny, now lives in Hertfordshire when on dry land – but has just spent 11 months aboard a 70ft yacht, skipper of a crew competing in the 2025-26 Clipper Round The World Race.
Amounting to around 40,000 nautical miles, this circumnavigation took Rees across some of the world’s most remote waters. Setting sail in August 2025, he and his crewmates returned to Portsmouth this July, having secured second place in the race. Merely competing was a lifelong dream for Rees, who was introduced to sailing by his dad at a young age and met the founder of the Clipper race, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, during a visit to his school. Last year, then, he left behind a 20-year career in HR to trace a vast arc across Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia and America.
The race is split into eight legs, with the crew choosing to go on one, multiple or all eight. Across the full circumnavigation, Rees led almost 60 people from 12 nationalities, ranging in age from 18 to 75. Around a third had no previous sailing experience, with the crew including everyone from recent graduates to seasoned businesspeople. “It’s really about the amateur crew that come on board and how they perform,” says Rees, who, along with first mate Zoe Langley, was one of two professionals on board.
In October – just two months into the race, with the yacht a week away from Cape Town – Langley was struck by a falling sail and broke her leg. Rees recalls with pride how the team rallied, however. “They came together when things got tough – when they hadn’t got any sleep, when the weather was terrible, when other things went wrong like sails ripping or damage to the boat.”
They sailed through the icy waters of the Southern Ocean to the tropical humidity around the Philippines, and across the vast north Pacific – where at points, the closest fellow humans were aboard the International Space Station. “When you are out there, there is a real sense that in that moment you are pretty alone,” Rees says now, “but you also wonder how many people have been there before you, and you think of the stories and adventures of those who have previously crossed the oceans.”
Responsible for up to 22 people on board at a time, Rees became something of a multi-hyphenate: doctor, engineer, meteorologist, strategist and skipper at once, operating on precious little sleep and with no showers to speak of. He became instinctively attuned to the boat, too – waking at the slightest sense that she was over-pressed, losing speed, or that an anxious voice had drifted up from the deck.
Returning home came as something of a shock. When Rees and I speak, it’s mid-September, but he says his sleep remains disturbed. “Particularly when we first finished. It was difficult because it was quite an abrupt stop. The morning after we finished in Portsmouth, I went back to the boat and started the normal process when we had a stopover – getting the boat fixed, cleaned, resupplied and ready to go again!”
Life on land is slowly returning to normal for Rees, though. He’s shortly to return to the office – now working for Western Marinas, who own a group of coastal facilities in Wales and Somerset. And after nearly a year circumnavigating the globe, you might expect his first instinct would be to stay firmly in one place. Instead, he was determined to fulfil a promise he made before his departure: to take his two daughters on holiday. “Part of doing the race,” he tells me, “was to show them that they should also follow their dreams.”
words JULIA BOTTOMS
