Geoff Holt MBE talks about the disabled sailors’ community
Sailing has taken Geoff Holt all over the world, but he can trace his journey right back to his childhood bedroom in Lower Swanwick. His window overlooked the River Hamble: ‘I could hear the rigging clinking at night,’ he remembers, ‘and at the weekend I would see the boats arriving from overseas or going off on adventures. I guess that’s where my curiosity about travel came from.’
Geoff Holt MBE, who now lives in Wallington near Fareham, is one of Britain’s most prominent yachtsmen. He’s also a Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire, former Yachtsman of the Year and a Vice President of the RNLI, among many other honours. But his life’s journey has been far from smooth sailing. By the age of 16, he’d left school and was first mate on a yacht sailing around the Mediterranean; later that year, he made his first Atlantic crossing, closely followed by his second and third. He was still only 18 years old when he signed up to be first mate on a luxury super yacht in the Virgin Islands.
On 5 September 1984, he signed the paperwork in Tortola and headed straight for the beach with a friend to celebrate. He remembers pulling on his shorts quickly and running towards the surf, keen to be in the water. Diving in, he hit his head on a sandbar and in that instant, his life changed. ‘I felt my neck break,’ he says, ‘but it didn’t hurt. And then, all of a sudden, I was floating face down, just rising and falling with the tide. I had a lung full of air, but I couldn’t turn over.’
Medics at the local hospital realised Geoff had a serious spinal injury, but didn’t have the facilities to treat him. He was evacuated by the US Coast Guard and flown to hospital in Puerto Rico, where he would spend the next month.
Coming home wasn’t easy. Geoff thought he had insurance; it turned out that wasn’t the case. Initially, the British government refused to repatriate him. Finally, he made it back on a Daily Mirror mercy flight and was admitted to a newly opened spinal unit in Salisbury. It was quickly established that he would never walk again. ‘I received amazing treatment,’ he says ‘but I had no money, no career and no real home.’
What he did have was a growing closeness to one of the nurses at the centre. Elaine left her job to begin a relationship with Geoff – they have now been married for 37 years – but although they had each other, life was hard. Eventually, they set up home in Southampton, with Elaine working long hours as an agency nurse.
All this time, Geoff was grieving the existence he’d known before. ‘Sailing wasn’t just part of my life – it was my life,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t watch it on TV, couldn’t read about it. I would hide photos of me on boats. I’d compare the way I felt to a pianist losing the use of his hands. Sailing was how I understood the world, and it was lost to me.’
Still, he knew he had to carry on and secured a position with a small accountancy firm called Deloitte, Haskins and Sells in Southampton. By his late 20s, he was head of business development and marketing at the firm that became Deloitte – one of the biggest accountancy firms in the country.
In 1991, he first piloted a boat again – a specially adapted trimaran dinghy on the River Itchen. ‘I was frightened that I would have forgotten how to sail, but I got in there, pulled the mainsheet in, turned the tiller, and it accelerated really fast across the river. I just remember smiling to myself thinking, I can still do it. That was transformative – it was like a light came back on.’
It wasn’t long before he was travelling overseas to represent Great Britain in races as far away as Sydney and California. And as he became more well-known as a disabled sailor, Geoff got more involved in the politics of the sport – becoming the inaugural chairman of Sailability, an internationally recognised charity improving access to sailing for disabled people.
It was in 2007 that he took on his first major challenge – what he called his Personal Everest – sailing around Great Britain solo in his small dinghy. ‘It is still the most amazing thing I’ve ever done in my life. It took 110 days to get round, and all that time Elaine and our son Tim – who was five at the time – were travelling with me in a motor home.’
Just two years later, Geoff was ready for the next challenge – crossing the Atlantic, as he had as a teenager. In the company of a carer and a BBC cameraman, he set sail from Lanzarote in November 2009. ‘Just over four weeks later, we arrived in Cane Garden Bay, Tortola, at the very beach where my life changed forever.
‘It wasn’t about exorcising demons or anything like that. In fact, it was a celebration. Twenty-five years ago on that beach, I’d lost my ability to walk but the accident didn’t take away my spirit or my bloody mindedness.’
The BBC documentary gave Geoff a platform he hadn’t had before and the resulting flood of correspondence made him realise how few opportunities existed for disabled people to have fun on boats.
‘I needed to find a way to get more disabled people out on the water,’ he says. ‘Sailing isn’t for everyone – you need the right clothing and the right weather. If you’re someone who needs to be tube-fed, or you need to lie flat every so often, it’s probably not going to be right for you so I started looking into power boats, and quickly realised there were no wheelchair-accessible options. So, I decided to create one – and that’s how the Wetwheels Foundation was born.’
Based at Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, Wetwheels allows disabled passengers and their families to enjoy the freedom of being on the water, and even drive the craft (under supervision). Each boat costs £250,000 to build and around £100,000 a year to run.
‘We part-mortgaged our house in the early days to plug a funding gap. In that first year we took 300 people out and we managed 800 the next year. Suddenly, people wanted to be part of it. We managed to attract financial support from philanthropists, grant-making trusts, wills and legacies. And within 18 months, we’d managed to pay off that debt.’
Now, there are eight Wetwheels boats based at harbours around the UK, and the charity takes more than 10,000 people out on the water each year. Many of them have profound and complex disabilities – often life-limiting conditions – and a third of them are under 21. The charity’s Hampshire partners include Treloar’s College in Alton – a college for young people with physical disabilities – and Rose Road in Southampton, which is a school and respite centre for very severely disabled young people.
‘I am in a fairly unique position where I have seen what this is like from both sides of the coin,’ says Geoff. ‘Quite often if people are born disabled, their aspiration horizon is low. That’s because they’ve always been told what they can’t do. But having lived as an able-bodied person, I wanted to know why I couldn’t do these things. And I wanted to share the experience with others.’
In May and June this year, Geoff embarked on his most recent challenge – another circumnavigation of the British Isles, to raise money and awareness for the final four boats in the Wetwheels fleet.
On a personal level, he remains in thrall to the ocean – with sea fishing his primary mode of relaxation. ‘I would be quite happy living on a yacht and sailing the world, if it wasn’t for the fact my whole family gets seasick – even the dog!’ he says.
‘But the sea is my happy space. You have to respect it and work with whatever it throws at you. You need to know how to adapt – so it’s a good metaphor for life.’
The Wetwheels Foundation is always looking for volunteers to help on trips. To find out more, go to wetwheelsfoundation.org
