When former Dunedin woman Rebecca Marks joined the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, she did not anticipate an encounter with a whale, assisting at a dramatic dawn rescue or bobbing around in giant seas in a yacht minus its mast and rigging.
But Miss Marks said the events - all of which occurred in the middle of the night - only added to the exhilaration of an unforgettable experience.
"You don't sign up for [things like that], but they are part of the unpredictableness of ocean racing.
"You can't control things. You are are the mercy of Mother Nature."
Miss Marks (29), who attended Bayfield High School and learnt to sail on Otago Harbour with her father Brent, a sailing instructor with the Vauxhall Yacht Club, was back in Dunedin on a visit earlier this month.
Now a physiotherapist living in London, she said she had always wanted to do more sailing than ride "dinghies in the harbour" but could never find a way of bridging the gap.
That was until she spotted an advertisement for the clipper race.
"When I saw you didn't need any huge experience and that they put you through the training, I couldn't believe my luck. I was addicted."
She was assigned to Team Finland where her fellow crew members ranged in age from 19 to 69 and included a banker, a florist, a dental surgeon, a student, an interior designer and a farmer.
The price of her berth for leg three of the race - from Cape Town to Geraldton, Western Australia via the Southern Ocean - included three weeks of training on the water and a week "frying your brain" in a classroom.
Miss Marks was so hooked she "somehow" found the money to participate in leg four as well - a 36-day trip from Geraldton to Quingdao, China - a total outlay of about $25,000.
During the 25-day nonstop Southern Ocean leg, Miss Marks, a watch leader and medic, battled seasickness for the first few days, as well as heavy seas, rough weather and broken sleep.
Then came the whale.
"I was on the helm, driving, when a big jolt came through the wheel. I thought I had lost the steering, but I hadn't.
"Everyone wondered what had happened, then someone looked behind the boat and there was a big whale's tail coming out of the water."
But the most dangerous events occurred in tropical waters on leg four.
Miss Marks was woken at 3.30am one morning and told another boat in the race, Cork, was stuck on a uncharted reef in the Java Sea and needed urgent assistance.
Team Finland and another clipper boat motored as close to the reef as they could.
At dawn, the Cork crew abandoned ship, setting out in heavy seas in two lifeboats.
The Team Finland crew took eight of the Cork crew aboard, giving them the last of the chocolate rations, dipping into emergency food supplies and "hot bunking" - putting a person into a bed when its previous occupant was on watch.
After a day and a-half it was decided Cork was not salvageable.
Equipment and personal belongings were retrieved and its crew was adopted out on to other race boats until it could rejoin a replacement boat at the Panama stopover.
It was off the southern coast of Taiwan that Team Finland ran into its own problems.
It was fighting 10m-high waves about 4am one morning when it went over a huge wave and crashed into a trough.
As the crew members struggled to stay on their feet, they heard a loud creaking and groaning noise.
The yacht's mast snapped into three pieces, the top third falling into the water, the middle third and boom smashing part of the guard rail, and the bottom third remaining in place.
As the vulnerable boat bobbed about, the skipper, Miss Marks and the other watch leaders used bolt cutters and knives to cut away the wire and rope rigging, and brute strength to pull the boom and ruined main sail aboard.
They motored into a Taiwanese port for immediate repairs before attaching a temporary rigging and sails, and sailing and motoring to Quingdao where a new mast and rigging were fitted.
