Sailing the Viking Route: What 510 Nautical Miles of North Atlantic Ocean Taught Me About Letting Go

My taxi driver in Reykjavík was an ex-marine. "The North Atlantic," he said when I told him my plan, "is the worst ocean in the world to be on." He didn't say it to scare me. He said it like a fact he'd long stopped being surprised by. Great start, I thought. I had landed in Iceland that morning under a total solar eclipse, visible from my plane window but hidden from every Icelander below by thick grey cloud. I took it as an omen.

I turned 40 this year. Previously, I was an operations executive in institutional finance, then a COO and co-founder of a FinTech SaaS startup. Currently, I am the founder of a children's travel adventure brand. For seventeen years I had a reputation, only half affectionately, as "The Wolf": go in, solve the problem, clean up the mess, finish the job, Pulp Fiction style. For a few years I'd also financed and tracked other marine boats from a desk in London, private credit deals in shipping, without ever once being on one myself. None of that prepared me for a 72-foot steel boat heeling at fifty degrees in the open ocean, or for how completely seasickness can strip away every version of competence you've ever built. I was sick six times. On deck, under deck, in the dining area, finally in my own bunk. There was no manual for this.

I sailed that route alongside fourteen other women. Four were professional sailors. The rest of us were amateurs, several of whom, like me, had never sailed before in our lives. To our knowledge, we were the initial all-female crew that navigated the Viking route. We were doing it to raise money and awareness for a Conservation International project supporting a woman-led seaweed initiative in Fiji. The mission mattered to me long before I understood quite how much the journey would cost me physically to finish it.

Our Captain referred to the start of the sail as "champagne sailing." Calm water, four dolphins and a pod of pilot whales circling our boat as all fifteen of us hauled the mast up, chanting "two, six, heave." I remember thinking they must have felt the female energy, if you believe in that sort of thing. On an early morning watch, half asleep and facing the horizon sideways (the only technique that helped my seasickness), I turned around to find a baby orca swimming ten metres from the boat. I'm a spiritual person, and I understand why sailors become one too.

Our departure from the Westman Islands marked a change. Three eight-metre swells and four-metre waves arrived simultaneously from all directions. The crew called my station the "snake pit", a tangle of blue, green, yellow, and red ropes for which I was responsible to read correctly and tidy under pressure, in real time. The seat offering superb ocean vistas proved terrible for a woman unaware of how severely seasickness would cripple her. No number of tablets did the job. I should genuinely have signed the buckets.

The situation below deck is far worse than it is on deck, and you're not prepared for it. Picture trying to get into four layers of foul weather gear on a sixty-degree slant, one hand on a metal rail and the other holding what remained of your dignity, while absorbing an entirely new vocabulary under duress: "winch, grind, fender, stern back, port end." Meanwhile, one of my crewmates, whose bunk was smaller and considerably less forgiving than mine, simply became the group's de facto mother, cooking full meals on a gas stove at a sideways tilt while the rest of us lay prone, useless, and occasionally apologising to her between waves of nausea. Apparently even a rescued bucket needs a chain of command out there.

Our skipper informed us that they had never witnessed such unusual weather behaviour. Wind speeds swung from twenty knots to eight and back within minutes, forcing the engine on and off in a pattern none of them recognised from experience. Searching for proof of climate change during that journey was not my objective. It sought me out, live, via instruments the crew had long monitored, but no longer trusted.

The Spice Girls would define the soundtrack of our journey, if I had to make a choice. We opened with our Posh Spice moment, champagne sailing on calm water at the start, whales included, the calm before everything that followed. Then came our full Sporty Spice stretch off Westman Islands (our captain's word for it, and an understatement), followed by our Scary Spice night below deck learning to function through a sideways ocean. Ginger Spice, for the record, showed up only in failed tablet form, no help to anyone. I am already lobbying for a warmer route next time, purely in the interest of finally earning my Baby Spice leg of the journey.

While on watch from 2am to 5am on our last sailing day, I noticed a light on the horizon. I wasn't certain if it was a lighthouse or a container ship, so I bellowed a phrase combining a sailor's hail and a battle cry: "Land ahoy!" It was land. The Faroe Islands, eighteen volcanic islands rising straight out of the water, sheep visible on the cliff sides before I could make out anything else. Someone on deck said there are more sheep here than people, seventy-five thousand to fifty-five thousand, and looking at the hillsides, I believed it instantly. I later learned Mykines island alone holds a puffin colony bigger than both put together, though by then I was too busy feeling my legs remember solid ground. During our entire crossing, the water remained free of plastic, a small, enduring symbol of hope after four days that showed the ocean's growing unpredictability.

I was the only South Asian woman on the boat and possibly one of few people of colour on the Faroe Islands that week. Should this narrative touch even a few South Asian children, or any youngsters (or grown-ups, for that matter), and foster the feeling that journeying oceanic distances is likewise theirs, then the six buckets will prove themselves worthwhile.

This expedition was always meant to become a book for Maya's Worldly Wonders®, my children's travel adventure series, built around Maya, a bold young girl whose own expeditions are drawn from mine. Somewhere off the Westman Islands, I started wondering whether this particular chapter might be too frightening even for Maya, and for the five- to eleven-year-olds who follow her. I have decided it isn't. Kids that age comprehend fright and resilience, plus their part in a team when problems arise. They possess sufficient maturity to learn about ocean warming from direct experience, observing its speed alteration firsthand, instead of relying on visual representations. I thought often about that crossing, about the explorers who did this without satellite navigation or a weather app, using only a sextant, which our skipper taught me how to use, along the calmer stretches.

Would I do it again? Yes, though I reserve the right to choose a warmer ocean. Watching open water, even water that has just tried to unseat you, is one of the more genuinely clarifying things you can do with your attention. You do not need to control the wind to gain wisdom from its currents, but stop supposing you were ever meant to be. Let go. It was worth every drop.

T

his expedition was organised by Panexplore and Her Planet Earth to support Conservation International's seaweed farming project for women in Fiji. To donate, visit justgiving.com/page/her-planet-earth-admin-18.