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When Caspar and Nichola Craven sailed around the world with their children they coped with 40ft waves, engine failure and medical emergencies but, above all, enjoyed a life-changing adventure, they tell DOMINIC MIDGLEY
Daily Express Saturday May 12 2018 EXCLUSIVE NE day in the autumn of 2013, mother-of-three Nichola Craven got a phone call from her elder daughter’s Surrey school. The teacher complained that Bluebell, eight, was refusing to put her name down for any class trips planned for the following year on the improbable grounds that she would be sailing around the world with her family.
“The teacher phoned me because she thought Bluebell was making it up,” explains Nichola. And who can blame her?
After all, it’s not often that a family of five ups sticks, boards a 53ft yacht and heads off across the Atlantic on an epic 35,000-mile voyage that will ultimately take in 84 harbours in 26 countries.
But that is precisely what Nichola, 46, and her 45-year-old husband Caspar did in August 2014. Over the next year and 11 months they enjoyed all the highs and lows that could be expected of such an intrepid venture: 40-knot winds and 40ft waves off South America, catastrophic engine failure in the middle of the Pacific and an onboard accident to one of the youngsters.
On the plus side they and their children – Bluebell, by now nine, Columbus, seven, and Willow, two –
Oenjoyed an adventure that included swimming with dolphins in French Polynesia, stroking cheetahs on safari and being greeted with a Zulu welcome dance in South Africa.
The exotic project was spawned at a family party in June 2009 when Caspar’s brother-in-law James idly mentioned a story he’d read about a family who had decided to take a break from normal life and sail around the world.
It immediately switched on a light bulb in Nichola’s head and in the car home she turned to her husband and said: “Shall we do it?” Caspar, who was working long hours running his own business and growing increasingly fed-up with the drudgery of commuting, was equally smitten with the idea.
“We were in our mid-30s and I was working 16 to 18 hours a day in the business,” he recalls. “I barely saw Nichola, barely saw the kids and we were asking ourselves: is this all there is to life?”
It should be said at this point that Caspar was already a seasoned sailor. Brought up in Devon he had acquired a fishing boat at the age of 14 and within three years had built a booming business exporting half a ton of crab and lobster to Spain every week. In 2000 at the age of 28 he had signed up for the BT Global Challenge – dubbed “the world’s toughest yacht race” – and spent 10 months negotiating some of the planet’s most challenging seas.
In the six months following their road to Damascus moment he and Nichola sat down together most weekends to create “a shared picture of the future”. They set a departure date of August 2014 that gave them almost five years to complete their preparations and set about getting their children used to the idea.
“We’d sit down with the kids and tell them stories about other people who’d gone to live in amazing places,” says Caspar. “We put a map of the world on the kitchen wall and we got magazines and cut out pictures to help fire their imagination.
“We also knew that we had to build up their confidence on the water. I’ve lost track of the number of people who’ve told me, ‘I went sailing once and I got seasick, got cold and never went back on a boat again’. So we’d take them out in