“I didn’t kill him, but I stabbed him with my foil”

As Celeste continues her voyage around the world, three crew members – Nigel, Dorin and Morten will be “long timers” on board. Nigel and Dorin will be sailing half the route with us, all the way to Australia, while Morten is staying on for the full circumnavigation.

First up is Nigel, a recently retired teacher who decided it was finally time to turn a lifelong dream of sailing the world into reality. In the coming weeks, we’ll also introduce Dorin and Morten – stay tuned.

Nigel Carrick was 19 -years-old and at university when his fencing coach died of a heart attach in the middle of a bout. “I didn’t kill him, but I stabbed him with my foil and he collapsed and died,” says Nigel, a recently retired school teacher who will sail with Celeste all the way to Australia. The incident changed his outlook on life.
“My coach was in his early 40s and had left home that morning expecting to return. It made me realize you never know how long you’ve got so you’ve got to make the most of every single day.” 

Nigel decided to lead a life of adventure so after obtaining his teaching degree, he took a job at the Outwood bound school in Hong Kong where corporations would send their executives for leadership training.

“The idea is to use the outdoors to put people in situations that challenge them in different ways to find out how they behave under pressure. It’s when you strip the veneer of civilisation that you lay bare people’s base character and it’s not always pretty,” he says.

The assignment involved extended educational sailing trips for participants to the Philippines, Borneo, and the islands within Hong Kong itself. Nigel’s two-year stint in Hong Kong became a transformative experience. At the end of his contract, he returned to the UK to work as a physical education teacher, but the notion that adventure trips and sailing could serve to build character would stay with him for the rest of his life. During school breaks Nigel would work with the Ocean Youth Club to take challenged youth on sailing trips to help them break distructive patterns.

So when his own son Will started battling with mental health problems, it felt natural to turn to sailing. “As a family we would spend holidays sailing the Meditteranean and Will absolutely loved it,” he says.

The plan became to buy a yatch and set out on an extended sailing adventure, possibly around the world. After ten years of planning and preparing, the family left to test slightly rougher seas around Lanzarote.

“It didn’t at all go as planned. The size of the swell intimidated Will, worsening his condition and my wife Amanada was seasick the entire journey,” Nigel recalls.
Both Amanda and Will decided sailing was not for them and Nigel was left grappling with what to do next. His retirement was coming up and his heart was still set on an extended adventure at sea.

“So one night at 2 a.m. I googled ‘sailing around the world’ and up came Celeste,” says Nigel. “I showed Amanda and she said ‘Go!’”

Ever since he was a young lad, Nigel loved to read and C.S Forester’s stories of Horatio Hornblower and Alexander Kent’s Richard Bolitho novels fed his romantic notions of life at sea. However, onboard Celeste, it’s non-fictional classics like Charles Darwin’s account of his five-year journey aboard HMS Beagle, Joshua Slocun’s ‘Sailing Alone Around the World’, and Captain James Cook’s journals that he plans to re-read. It is the places they traveled that he is most excited about visiting.
“I can’t wait for the Galápagos and the South Pacific, specifically Vanuatu, one of the most volcanically active regions on Earth,” says Nigel.

Three weeks into this 7-month long adventure, Nigel has no regrets. However, he has developed a new fear shaped by the fact that he is constantly surrounded by Swedes. “I really hope I don’t end up speaking English with a Swedish accent when this is all over,” he laughs.