{"id":1519,"date":"2014-10-31T10:53:43","date_gmt":"2014-10-31T14:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/?p=1519"},"modified":"2025-01-28T09:18:55","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:18:55","slug":"adventure-on-the-high-seas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2014\/10\/adventure-on-the-high-seas\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventure on the High Seas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cNobody can prepare you for when you\u2019re out alone in a 50-foot swell with 18 people.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was somewhere between South Africa and Australia, in the middle of the Southern Ocean \u2014 where storms roared up from Antarctica and the swells rose 50 feet or more that Meg Reilly truly understood the meaning of \u201cawesome\u201d \u2014 an adjective she had tossed around so casually when she was a student at Seton Hall.<\/p>\n

\"megreilly2\"<\/a>She was on the bow of a 70-foot clipper, on the third leg of an 11-month race around the world, changing a sail as the biggest waves she had yet seen were rolling in from behind. As she looked back she saw a looming wall of water dwarfing her crewmate at the helm. \u201cIt just made him look like an ant, and I\u2019m just sitting up there for a moment smiling, like \u2018This is awesome,\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

They surfed right down the face of that swell, and the one behind that, and the one behind that, all through the storm, hitting speeds of more than 30 knots, and nowhere along the way did she wish she had stuck at her desk job in Manhattan instead of signing up for a once-in-a-lifetime journey that induced in her an enduring state of awe.<\/p>\n

\u201cI compare it to why people watch scary movies and like roller coasters,\u201d she says. \u201cIt scares you to life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Challenge<\/h3>\n

Until a few months earlier, Reilly\u2019s seafaring adventures had mostly been confined to the placid waters of Barnegat Bay, N.J., in her family\u2019s 25-foot powerboat on summer vacations. After graduating in 2012 with a bachelor\u2019s degree in business administration, she had landed exactly the job was aiming for, with Young & Rubicam, the giant marketing and communications company. But after four months she was restless enough to be moved to action by a story she spotted on CNN.<\/p>\n

\"Reilly<\/a>
Reilly faced treacherous conditions on her voyage, including 50-foot swells, but returned safely home to her family with a gold medal finish.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMy heart was pounding,\u201d she says. The story was about the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, almost a year at sea with other similarly restless souls, many of them sailing novices like her. \u201cI\u2019ve never had a reaction like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

She applied immediately, telling no one. \u201cI just had a gut feeling that I had to do it and I didn\u2019t want someone to tell me no,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Offered a spot, she then had to figure out how to afford it. She had saved some money and paid down her student loans by living at home and commuting to Manhattan, but the price tag was $67,000, and she did not hail from the kind of tony sailing haven where that might be regarded as pocket change.<\/p>\n

She did, however, know enough about marketing from her studies and her job that she managed to find a sponsor, 4POINT4, a sports apparel company.<\/p>\n

Next she had to learn how to sail. She trained for three weeks in England, where the Clipper Race was founded in 1995, and where the 12 boats in the most recent race launched from last summer. The open ocean left her feeling both exalted and nauseous.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw my first shooting star and then I saw two more and I\u2019m like, \u2018Sold, you got me,\u2019\u201d she says. But she was seasick, too. \u201cI was kind of mentally preparing myself to feel sick for a year. That was my new normal \u2014 I\u2019m going to feel horrendous but I\u2019m going to do it anyway because I\u2019m a quite stubborn individual.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Clipper race is not a pampered, leisurely cruise among the tropical outposts favored by the yachting class. The crews were led by professional captains and worked around the clock while at sea: four hours on, four hours off, with no chance for a full-night\u2019s sleep until they reached port, where their stays were usually just a few days. Their longest stretch at sea was 35 days, between Brisbane and Singapore. Most of the people who signed up for the race were \u201cleggers,\u201d aboard for just a stretch or two. Reilly was among the smaller group of \u201cround-the-worlders.\u201d When she returned to the boat after each port call, her seasickness would return, too, but it would fade after a few days back at sea.<\/p>\n

Although she hadn\u2019t cooked much before, she was assigned as the boat\u2019s victualer, which occasioned a panicked call to her mother for recipes. Among those in the 25-page document her mother assembled was the one that became the crew\u2019s favorite: pasta with artichoke hearts, sundried tomatoes, chicken and a lemony sauce.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if it had the chicken in there all the time,\u201d says her mother, Paula Gunther-Reilly.
\nThe crew named the dish Pasta Henri Lloyd, for the name of their boat, which was named after their sponsor, a British marine apparel company.<\/p>\n

Her father traveled to England to see her off in September 2013, and left her with some advice from his own time at sea. A Navy veteran and a professional mariner who worked for many years for an oil-spill response company, he has most recently been rebuilding hurricane-damaged jetties on the Texas coast and has logged almost half a million ocean miles.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Clipper group does a good job preparing everybody for the race, but nobody can prepare you for when you\u2019re out alone in a 50-foot swell with 18 people,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

You also can\u2019t prepare for the days when the wind dies and you barely move, or for the sweltering heat around the equator, or for when the rudder breaks or the water-maker stops working. Or for the dolphins and killer whales riding the waves alongside, or for the way each sunset and sunrise looks different from the one before.<\/p>\n

Or for the transformation of an amateur sailor into a competitive racer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I signed up, really, the racing part had nothing to do with it. I was there for me,\u201d Reilly says. \u201cBut then I realized this is a team sport and it could never be just about an individual.\u201d<\/p>\n

And when the Henri Lloyd pulled into Jersey City in June, it was, to her great delight, in first place.<\/p>\n

Meeting the boat at 11 at night were her parents, her three younger sisters and a host of aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors, many of whom had been tracking the race map on their smartphones.<\/p>\n

\"megandmom\"<\/a>The Henri Lloyd was still in first place when it arrived in London in mid-July after 47,000 miles, leading the parade of clippers up the Thames and under the Tower Bridge.<\/p>\n

The Success Story<\/h3>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much time to think,\u201d Reilly says. \u201cI learned that the ideas of what I thought I should do with my life were not really my own but kind of a product of what society thinks is right and what success is and that just didn\u2019t work for me and that\u2019s why I was unhappy in what I thought was my dream job.\u201d<\/p>\n

She blogged from the boat, and plans now to write a book about her journey, as well as to give more talks of the kind she gave at several stops along the way, including at her alma mater, Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School, and the Scotch Plains elementary school where her mother is an art teacher.<\/p>\n

\"meghomecoming2\"<\/a>\u201cI\u2019ve learned that there are places where I think my mind, my body and my emotions have limits, but you can push beyond them,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are so many things you learn about how to motivate people to do things toward a common goal when they are miserable and overworked and underslept, about how to you get a team together when everybody doesn\u2019t want to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also learned that, wherever she goes next, a boat should be nearby. \u201cI made it almost a week and a half without aching to be on the water,\u201d she says. So in the middle of her post-race trip around Europe, she took a boat out \u2014 just a small one \u2014 and sailed for a little while off the coast of France.<\/p>\n

Kevin Coyne is a New Jersey writer who teaches at Columbia\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism.<\/cite><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meg Reilly \u201912 took an unusual turn in her post-college life. She left behind a coveted position in communications to enlist in a yearlong, 47,000-mile ocean race. <\/p>\n

Continue ReadingAdventure on the High Seas<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":1538,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,11,257],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2010-2014","category-alumni","category-articles-2010-2014","has-featured-video","entry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1519"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3702,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519\/revisions\/3702"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}