“How was it?” It’s an impossibly succinct, unanswerable question after any big experience . “It was good!” Is usually the response. A reply that is also unsatisfactorily short. In five years with Maiden I was never any good at answering it. We had countless adventures, but most of life happens to us in moments, not sagas. How can you conjure up thousands of moments and then articulate them on command? Below deck there are countless freeze-dried meals, becoming saturated while we try to desaturate: Moving around our fellow teammates in a clumsy dance as we navigate from bunk, to grey box, to foulie locker, to boot rack - passing by the nav desk and galley to gobble up insight and sustenance. The comforting warmth of the freezies fills our stomachs and sends us to bed. There is your forehead resting against the heel of your hand as you reverse engineer the clew of a spinnaker, deciding how many layers in what shapes to cut, to get the sail back in the air. There’s pride when you manage to take a sight correctly that proves useful in creating a fix. To counter, there is frustration and an unsavoury internal monologue when you find out your last dead reckoning was off due to a mistake you shouldn’t have made when you were tired, and brain function was suboptimal. Above deck, there is your heart beating in your chest as you focus on helming, your gloved hands gripping the wheel, keeping the following seas at the best angle to your stern at a given moment. The shorter the period, the higher your chances of getting knocked off course - so all your teammates sit ready on the mainsheet and the vang release to get our boat back on track. There’s an instant in the middle of a gale when you’re balancing on the mast to take a reef, a metre above the deck, and pause to allow a teammate to do their part. You feel your boat shudder as it surfs a wave and glance forward to see white water ahead for a change - from a wave that passed us, already broken. Bright balls of bioluminescence light up the waves as we careen down the next one. Unexpected beauty when the sky is pelting everything it has at you. There are the beloved albatrosses, gliding without effort over thousands of miles of sea. And there are moments of hilarity: Lana’s song remixes for Sunday meetings. Stepping from one helm pit to another and having to dodge a squid on the way over. So many small instances when your teammates make you grin. It’s easy enough to forget about your freezing cold fingers, and the icy waves you took over your head. How was it? That’s a small slice of how it was. Erica sailed with Maiden in the first and second World Tours, and for the Southern Ocean legs of the Ocean Globe Race. She has crossed every degree of longitude on board, and many more than once. In addition to building miles on Maiden, she built new dreams and expectations for her own racing career. Maiden’s skippers had completed multiple Volvo Ocean Races, and demonstrated strong confidence and leadership skills on board. Learning new skills was as critical as un-learning all the beliefs she had been exposed to, of what girls are capable of on a racing team. This September Erica will be representing her country for a second time in the Double-Handed Offshore World Championships. Her goal is a 2025 campaign for the Solitaire du Figaro: A legendary and tough series of marathon-like races which she will complete single-handed. This same event was a launching pad for other Maiden skippers such as Liz Wardley and Marie-Claude Heys, and a platform in which many Vendee Globe sailors return to train. She is set on following in Tracy‘s footsteps, carving a space for more female sailors in the offshore sailing world.