Advocate

INNOVATE |ADVOCATE | COLLABORATE | EDUCATE

To publicly support, recommend or argue for a cause or reform. To raise awareness, seek and promote solutions, actively help, encourage and support individuals to find their voice and purpose.

I have always as long as I can remember, wanted to champion the underdog, always wanting to give a voice to those who did not have one, I am acutely aware of how lucky I was to grow up sailing and spend the first twelve years of my working life at sea and ultimately to have found employment in the maritime sector for my entire working life. An uncomfortable reality of our industry is that for many young people accessing a career on a superyacht is completely impossible, the barriers are just too great. Those barriers are often social and nearly always financial, even when the social barriers can be overcome, the financial ones remain exceedingly difficult to bridge.
There are organisations out there and small bursary pots who are trying in a small way to redress the balance, but it is never enough, and through my own work encouraging young people to make careers in the industry, and many years of applying and lobbying for more support, I frequently find that despite my best efforts anything over the cost of the most basic training can be almost impossible to find.

So many young people are not even aware of the opportunities available to them and even if they were, do not have the support and guidance around them to succeed. From my early days working in sail training and seeing the transformative effect of taking kids to sea, using the routines and physical challenges of life onboard to give them a sense of achievement and worth. I have no doubt that working in the industry is an incredible opportunity; regardless of whether it is for five years and counts as your “university of life” or it is your lifelong career. I am driven by a personal mission to work with the industry to remove financial and social barriers to enable young people to access careers at sea and I am convinced the answers and the money is there, we all simply need to do so much more.

“To be an advocate, is to have courage, independence and passion, for the things that matter.”

Kristen Uedoi

As someone who worked as a professional small yacht skipper and instructor in my early twenties in the 80’s, where I experienced fantastic unbiased support and encouragement from “the old boys” of the time, to later in my career when I was subjected to the worst of chauvinistic and belittling behaviour. I am passionate advocate for encouraging not just women but individuals of all genders to have equal and unbiased opportunities to work in all areas of the maritime industry both at sea and ashore.

Working at sea, even in our modern era of regulated safety is still a dangerous profession, I have experienced a serious incident whilst at sea, and very sadly, I have first-hand experience of a student dying in a tragic accident onboard in Antibes. The experience of supporting the young man’s family through the aftermath, drove me to set up a bursary in his name, and provide automatic Nautilus membership for all the students in my organisations care. The wider outcome, was the conviction that the industry itself from the training providers up, needed to adopt a committed duty of care and level of integrity, to protect and support the crew and their families when accidents occur, however inconvenient that might be to owners, schedules and income.

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

Mahatma Gandhi