Making her own luck

CLIPPER SKIPPER WENDY TUCK IS THE FIRST WOMAN TO WIN A ROUND THE WORLD RACE. FOUND OUT HOW SHE GOT THERE

Wendy Tuck did not set out with ambitions of breaking new ground for female sailing when she signed up for her second Clipper Round the World Race. She hadn’t even planned to do a whole circumnavigation, instead offering to do a couple of legs as a returning skipper to help out. But the opportunity came up, and Tuck knows how to make the best of chances in life.

‘Wendo’, as she is widely known, 52, grew up in New South Wales, Australia, but the yacht clubs of Sydney were not her world. Instead Tuck played soccer and, despite living in one of Sydney’s less affluent areas away from the coast, developed an inconvenient passion for surfing.

“My family had always had little fishing boats, so I’d always gone out on the ocean with Dad. But as a kid we surfed – we didn’t live close to the water so it used to take me two hours at least to get to the surf. I’d get up at 4 o’clock in the morning, walk an hour to the train station…all that sort of stuff. But I’ve always had a real love for the ocean.”

Sailing didn’t come onto her radar until she was in her twenties, married to an Englishman and living in Spain. Some acquaintances were selling a small twin-keeled yacht and, confident that sailing couldn’t be too much of a mystery to someone who’d grown up around fishing boats and surf breaks, Tuck decided to buy it.

“We bought this yacht with no idea how to sail,” she recalls. “When we took it out the first time we read the book and did what the book said to do, and went ‘Holy sh*t! We’re moving!’”

Tuck later divorced and returned to Australia, where she got chatting by chance to an older yachtsman about his wooden classic. The pair started sailing together for fun, and Tuck got a chance to develop her skills.

“We just did a few twilight races on this beautiful 30ft boat. And he taught me all the seamanship skills; we used to sail it on and off the mooring with just the two of us,

HELEN FRETTER

and onto the pontoons just to see if we could do it! It would be blowing 40 knots in the harbour and we’d just go for a sail, because the boat loved that.”

In her thirties, working in an unfulfilling job in a travel agent – “I was sort of not made to work in an office!” – Tuck began to wonder if sailing could offer some more interesting opportunities.

“I thought maybe I could make a career out of this, just teaching or skippering charter boats, and I wanted to get into racing. So when the travel company I was working for went bankrupt, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to go and get my first ticket.”

Ambitions to race

Tuck qualified as a sailing instructor and began working for a large Sydney charter operator. But the racing bug had struck, and Tuck wanted to do more – specifically the Sydney Hobart Race, which didn’t fit with the busy charter schedule.

“Every year, I’d ask ‘Can I have the week off?’. No! So eventually I just quit being employed full time and worked freelance so I could do my first Hobart,” she recalls.

It was a risk and, although she was able to pursue more racing, competing on boats like Wild Thing and ultimately earning her place on the honours board as an 11-time Sydney Hobart veteran, it came without the security of a regular income.

“It’s tough, you’re never going to make a fortune, but I always got by. Then in winter for the last few years I started working on one of the [Sydney] ferries as well. So I was first mate, and I was thinking ‘Do I get my next ticket so

I can actually drive it?’ Then I got a call up from Justin Taylor, at Clipper.”

Tuck had applied for a Clipper skipper role two races ago, and had nearly been offered a position but didn’t have the correct visa to work in the UK for the training period before the race. But the requirements changed