Hi, it's Elise Hu, and you're listening to Ted Talks daily, Tracey Edwards is most at home and most free at sea.

She's a trailblazer who sails far from safe harbors as an ocean racing sailor and navigator in her Ted 20-20 talk. She takes the lessons she learned from navigating boats and applies them to life. It's a message for all of us, whether we're fans of the surf or the turf.

Being able to navigate is an extraordinary gift, and there is nothing like it in the world. I get no more sense of satisfaction greater than leaving a port and knowing that I can get my team and my boats safely from that port to another port, maybe three, four, five, 6000 miles away. Being at sea for me, is it total freedom? And it is the ultimate opportunity to be you because you can't be anything else.

You are naked in front of your peers on a boat. It is a small area made fifty eight feet long. There's 12 women and a fifty eight foot boat. I mean, you are literally up against each other and so you have to be you.

The greatest moment for me when I'm sailing is the moment that the land disappears.

It's an indescribable moment of adventure and no turning back and just you and the boat and the elements. And I wish everyone could experience this at least once in their lives. The further you get away from land, the more you kind of fit into yourself. It is you. How do we get to the next place? How do we stay alive? How do we look after each other and what do we do to get to the other side? So the question I get asked the most when I go into talks is how do you become an ocean racing sailor?

And that's a really good question. And I've always wanted to say I had a vision which became a dream, which became an obsession. But of course, life's not like that. And one thing I'm really anxious for people to know about me is that my life hasn't gone from A to B, because how many people can say their lives just go from A to B, they think I'm going to do this and they go and do it. So I tell the truth.

And the truth is that I was expelled from school when I was 15 years old and my long suffering headmaster sent a long, long suffering note to my long suffering mother, basically saying if Tracy darkens the doors of the school again, then we will call the police. And my mum looked at me and she said, DI, education is not for everyone. And then she gave me the best piece of advice anyone ever has given me. She said, Every single one of us is good at something.

You just have to go and find what that is. And at the age of 16, she let me go backpacking off to Greece. I ended up working on boats, which was like 17 years old, didn't really know what to do. And I'm going with the flow. And then on my second transatlantic, my skipper said to me, Can you navigate? And I said, Of course I can't navigate. I was expelled for long division. They said, well, don't you think you should be able to navigate?

You know, what happens if I fall over the side, stop being a bystander in your own life, stop looking at what you're doing and start taking part. This day for me was the day that my whole life started. I learned to navigate in two days. And this is someone who hates numbers and sees them as hieroglyphics. It opens up avenues and opportunities to me that I could never have imagined. I actually managed to get a ride on a Whitbread round the World Race Boat.

It was with seventeen South African men and me was 21 years old and it was the longest nine months of my life. But I went to the cook. I managed to survive until the end. And when I got to the end of this race, I realised that there were two hundred and thirty crew in this race and three women, and I was one of them. And I'm a lousy cook. I'm a really good navigator. I think the second most profound thought in my entire life was no man is ever going to allow me to be a navigator on their boat ever.

And that is still the case today. In 35 years, the British have been two female navigators that haven't been an all female cruise. And that's how Maiden was born. That was the moment I thought, I've got something to fight for. And I, I had no idea that I wanted to have this fight. And it was something that I took to like a duck to water it. I discovered things about myself that I had no idea existed.

I discovered I had a fighting spirit. I discovered I was competitive, never knew that before. And I discovered my second passion, which was equality. I couldn't let this one lie. And it became not just about me wanting to navigate on a boat and having to put my own crew together on my own team, raise my own money, find my own boat so that I could be a navigator. This was about women everywhere. And this was when I realised that this was probably what I was going to spend the rest of my life doing.

It took ages for us to find the money to the 1989 Whitbread round the world race. And as we looked at all the big multi-million pound, all male projects around us with that brand new shiny boats designed for the race, we realized this was not going to be us. We had to make this up as we went along. No one had enough faith in us to give us this kind of money. So I mortgage my house and we found an old wreck with a pedigree.

Whitbread boats had already been around the world twice in South Africa, we somehow persuaded some guy to put on a ship and bring her back to the UK for us. The girls were horrified at the fate of the boat. We got a free place in the yard. We got her up on the hard and we redesigned her. We ripped her apart. We did all the work ourselves. It was the first time that anyone had ever seen women in a shipyard.

So that was quite entertaining. Every morning we would walk in, everyone just gawk at us. But it also had its advantages because everyone was so helpful. We were such a novelty. You know, we got given a generator, an engine to you. This old rope. Yep. Old sails. Yep. We'll have those. So we we really made it up as we went along. And I think actually one of the huge advantages we had was, you know, there was no preconceived idea about how it all female crew would sail around the world.

So whatever we did was OK. And what it also did was it drew people to it, not just women, men, anyone who had ever been told you can't do something because you're not good enough. You're right.

Gender or race or color or whatever, maybe became a passion and it was hard to raise the money. Hundreds of companies wouldn't sponsor us. They told us that we couldn't do it. People thought we were going to die. You know, guys would let you come up to me and say, you're going to die.

I think, okay, that's my business, not yours.

In the end, King Hussein of Jordan sponsored Maden, and that was an amazing thing way ahead of his time, all about equality. We sailed around the world with a message of peace and equality. We were the only boat on the race with a message of any kind. We won two legs of the Whitbread, two of the most difficult legs, and we came second overall. And that is still the best result for a British boat since nineteen seventy seven.

It annoyed a lot of people and I think what I did at the time, we didn't realise, you know, we cross the finishing line, this incredible finish, 600 boats sailing up the soul with us. Fifty thousand people in Ocean Village chanting made a maiden as we sailed in. And so we knew we'd done something that we wanted to do and we hoped we'd achieved something good. But we have no idea at the time how many women's lives we changed.

The Southern Ocean is my favourite ocean. Each ocean has a character. So the North Atlantic is a jumping ocean. It's a jolly go for it heave ho type of fun type of ocean. The Southern Ocean is a deadly serious ocean. And you know, when the moment you cross into the Southern Ocean, the latitude and longitude, you know, when you're there, the waves have been building. They start getting big white caps on the top. It becomes really grey.

You start to get sensory deprivation.

It is very focused on who you are and what you are with this massive wilderness around you.

It is empty. It is so big and so empty. You see albatrosses swirling around the boat. It takes about four days to sail through that territory. So you have the same albatross for four days and they find us quite an oddity. So they literally windsurf of the wind that comes off the mainsail than they had behind the boat. And you sort of feel his presence behind you. Turn around. And this is Albatross just looking at you. We sold Maden at the end of the race.

We still have no money. And five years ago we found her at the same time as a film director decided he wanted to make a documentary about Najin. We found mate and she burst back into my life and reminded me a lot of things I've forgotten actually over the years about following my heart and my gut and really being part of the universe and everything I find important in life. Madan has given back to me again. We rescued her.

We did a crowdfunder were rescued her from the Seychelles Princess Higher. King Hussein's daughter funded the shipping back to the UK and then the restoration. All the original crew were involved. We put the original team back together and then we decided, what are we going to do with Maydan? And this for me really was the moment of my life where I looked back on every single thing that I've done, every project, every feeling, every passion, every battle, every fight.

And I decided that I wanted Maydan to continue that fight for the next generation. Meitner Sailing Round the world, a five year world tour. We are engaging with thousands of girls all over the world. We are supporting community programs that get girls into education. Education doesn't just mean sitting in a classroom. This for me is about teaching girls. You don't have to look a certain way. You don't have to feel a certain way. You don't have to behave a certain way.

You can be successful. You can follow your dreams and you can fight for them. Life doesn't go for me to be its message. My life has been a mess from beginning to end.

But somehow I've got to where we go in the future for us and made and looks amazing. And for me it is all about closing the circle. It's about closing the circle with Megan and using her to tell girls that if just one person believes in you, you can do anything.

PR ex.