Last year nineteen-year-old UK student Oscar Mead hit the sailing headlines when he became the youngest ever competitor in the OSTAR singlehanded transatlantic race. Far surpassing the major achievement of simply getting himself and his boat across the Atlantic, he also proved to himself and others that he had the potential to become a serious singlehanded offshore competitor by finishing second in class – missing out on a class win by just twenty-five minutes. Now, whilst till in his nineteenth year, Mead recently made public his transition to sailing’s big league with the announcement of his entry in the 2010/11 Velux Five Oceans Race. I caught up with him last week to find out more about this remarkable young man, his preparation for the Velux Five Oceans Race and his longer-term plans for the future.

Despite the obvious excitement surrounding his recent announcements, Meade’s told me that his focus for the next six weeks was on completing the second year of his Yacht and Powercraft Design course in Southampton. Balancing a full time education with his life as a sailor has not proved to be easy. ‘They have very kindly agreed to give me a year off next term to allow me to compete in the Velux. It has been tricky at times though and I find that when progress on the racing campaign is going well, the University work takes a tumble and vice versa. I had the same problem in the first year when I did the OSTAR. It’s not easy to get the balance right, but on the plus side I guess it forces me to be more organised.’ 

Mead says that he has always harboured a dream to compete in a major singlehanded ocean race. ‘I’m part of the Ellen MacArthur generation and I was utterly inspired by her achievements. Watching the videos of her competing in the Vendee had a huge effect on me. I don’t think we have seen anything since that has been as exciting or emotional. Watching Ellen was what kicked off my dream of becoming a singlehanded competitor. I have spent years in the shed, building models of what my perfect Open 60 yacht would be.’ Mead admits that his ultimate goal is to emulate his hero MacArthur by one day mounting a Vendee campaign of his own. ‘The OSTAR was the starting point for me in that it was the smallest ‘big thing’ I could think of to compete in. I was worried though before the race that I might get out there and find that I wasn’t suited to that kind of racing. Fortunately it turned out that I really enjoyed the experience. I faced a lot of challenges during the race, but I loved every minute of it and I immediately knew that I wanted to find a way of doing more racing like this.’

So what is it about Mead that he believes makes him suitable for singlehanded offshore racing? ‘When I spoke to people about this kind of racing, lots of them said that you had to have an element of crazy. I actually believe that it is more about control-freakery. I love to tinker and when you are offshore racing alone, you have to be constantly checking, tweaking, trimming and repairing. Sailing with a full crew is just not the same experience. I did the Fastnet with the boys on the Artemis Open 60 last year and whilst I learned a huge amount about sailing the boat and optimising the setup for maximum speed, I found it strange to have long periods when I had no job to do.’

Mead says that the big things he learned from is OSTAR experience which would help him make the step up to high performance singlehanded offshore racing mainly centred around preparation and managing himself. ‘Eating and making sure I get the right amount of sleep was a key learn. On the OSTAR, due to my inexperience, I never really got into the right routine. I tended to sleep in twenty-five minute blocks. I would sleep at dawn and dusk, so that I was awake in the middle of the day and the middle of the night. I could rack up four or five hours sleep in every twenty-four that way. Eating was a bit of an issue for me. I get seasick and for the first four days the last thing I wanted to think about was food. This problem was compounded by the fact that the stove onboard lacked gimbals. When I did get to prepare food it was a bit of a struggle, with the contents of the pan ending up on the ceiling on more than one occasion. Funny now, but at the time it was incredibly frustrating. I am going to be focusing on the way we prepare the boat and its contents for the Velux. I now know just how important it is to be able to go straight to the right bit of kit when you need to sort out a boat problem. It surprised me on the OSTAR just how slowly you think and react to relatively small problems when you are down below banging upwind in big waves.’

He sums up his biggest take away from the OSTAR like this ‘I think I learned the importance of just not doing anything stupid. You really don’t think as clearly at sea as you do on land. I’m a fairly gung-ho type of person and I will always tend to say ‘OK let’s go for it, throw up the big spinnaker or something like that. I threw away first in class in the OSTAR for exactly that reason. I chose the option of blasting along at twenty something knots on the surf in the middle of the ocean, but I ended up blowing up the big chute, which meant that I didn’t have it in the final stages of the race. I missed out the class win by twenty-five minutes in the end; time I could have saved if I had been smart enough to protect that spinnaker. What I learned was really the importance of being more strategic and planning for the whole race.

Within a few days of finishing that race, Mead says he knew that participation in the Velux would be his next goal. ‘It was such a big step though. Getting a pretty standard thirt-four foot boat across the Atlantic is one thing, but moving up to racing an all singing all dancing Open 60 around the world is quite another.’ To check whether he was being totally unrealistic to even attempt to mount such a campaign, Mead called singlehanded veterans such as Brian Thompson, Mike Golding and Ellen MacArthur for a reality check. ‘The responses were surprisingly positive. Typically Ellen just said to go for it, Mike said he thought it was very feasible and Brian was equally pro the idea. Robin Knox Johnson was also very supportive and even took me out on his Open 60 to give me a real feel for what those boats are like.’ Whilst spurred on by all of this feedback, Mead says what followed next was a period of personal soul searching. ‘I spent a long time trying to work out if I really believed that I was actually up to the task. Was I really ready to step up to the challenge of taking a high performance sixty-footer around the world? Once I had worked out in my own mind that I was, it was a case of starting off down the road to making it a reality.’

As is often the case with solo campaigns, that road was not an easy one to navigate. ‘To be honest, although it has all really come together very recently, we were pretty close to giving up. The later things got, the more likely we would be to put together a poorly prepared campaign and to be frank, I didn’t want to run the risk of killing myself racing singlehanded around the world.’ With his agreed cut off looming large however, a private individual came forward with an unexpected offer of the money needed to purchase the boat. Suddenly it was all back on again. ‘Realistically we are fifty percent of the way there. I have a boat and I’m officially entered in the race, but the title sponsor I need to fund the rest of the campaign is still not in place.’ Mead has recently announced his own innovative twist on the familiar ‘fan club’ approach to campaigb funding. ‘Traditionally the way it works is that people can support campaigns like mine with a financial donation and in return they get their name on the side of the boat, or a t-shirt or hat or something similar. What we are offering through our 199 Club is that everybody who contributes definitely gets to come sailing with me on the boat. By that I mean proper sailing too. Once we take possession of the boat, my plan is to be out sailing every single day. I think that Open 60’s are regarded as a kind of mythical beast that nobody really knows too much about. You see them on the dock or watch some of the onboard video from offshore, but very few people get to experience what it is like to actually sail one flat out. That’s what we are offering with the 199 Club. Contributors will get to sail with me in full training mode and not just a corporate style, double-reefed jolly on the Solent; they will get to find out exactly what it is like to push an Open 60 hard out on the water; big spinnaker up in thirty knots to see what the boat can do, that sort of scenario.’

Talking to Mead during our interview, it is easy to forget that he has not yet turned twenty years old. Interestingly, in his self-promotion efforts Mead has not majored on his reduced years as the key selling point. He explains‘We are lucky to have that as a factor in this campaign. Being the youngest competitor is a unique, but it’s not why I’m doing this. There are plenty of examples right now of sailing projects where the focus is on who can become the youngest to sail around the world. If a sponsor wanted to latch on to the fact that I’m nineteen and the youngest skipper in the Velux Five Oceans Race, that then fine, but I’m really not just there looking to rack up any records as the youngest person to do anything. This is not about me becoming a celebrity, it’s about achieving my personal sailing goals. The big hook I believe for potential sponsors is the huge amount of media output which this race will generate. The Velux organisers have put a lot of effort into helping all the skippers become more media savvy. They are providing funds to put more cameras on the boats to make sure the video output from the boasts is the best it can be. The big thing is that they are going to be producing a twelve part TV series about the race which sponsors will be able to benefit massively from.’

Whilst making it to the start of the Velux Five Oceans Race is a milestone on his journey towards his ultimate target of a place in the Vendee Globe, he rightly regards the Velux as a very significant challenge in its own right. ‘To be sitting here a few months before the start of the Velux and be able to say that I have an Open 60 to race is a massive fulfilment of one of my dreams right there. The fact that I’m going to racing that boat around the world soon is just such an exciting project.’ So does all this anticipation keep him awake at night? ‘It does. Not so much the fact that I will be racing around the world, but the fact that I’m not yet funded sufficiently and I need to find that title sponsor. How do we make our team and our project the most appetising to the sponsors? How do we push things along from here? That’s the stuff that stops me sleeping.’