Ella Hebron may be a British national, but her first sailing experience was on Chesapeake Bay when she was “eight or nine,” as she recalled. “It was at a friend’s wedding with my parents,” she said. “They took us out on a sailing boat. I don’t remember where, but it was somewhere near Maryland.”
And no, she doesn’t know about the town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that bears her surname, or whether there’s any family connection.
It’s hard to say whether that early voyage planted a seed, but she learned to sail shortly after her return to the United Kingdom, graduating from dinghies to larger yachts and now ocean racing. And she’s returning to the Chesapeake aboard Washington DC, a boat sponsored by Events DC in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race. It will be her second time back in the Bay since her childhood. The last time she was first mate on the DC boat. This time, she’s the skipper, the youngest in the fleet of 10 70-foot racing yachts.
It has been “quite an unusual life experience,” she said in a telephone interview from Seattle, the race’s latest stopover. In addition to the sailing experience, she says she had to learn “very quickly about sailing and leadership skills, leading a group, getting them to work together.”
And in this case, it’s a group of amateur sailors, eight of them from Washington and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs who have paid as much as $50,000 for this adventure, many of whom have never “stepped on a boat before,” Hebron said. They took the four-week training course before starting the race. Some are signed on as few as one leg, others for as many as four and a few are “spending a whole year sailing around the world.”
Naturally, there will be some crew members who get out in the ocean and realize this isn’t for them, she said. “You have to expect there are going to be some tough moments. And it’s up to me to show them they have to find something good to focus on.”
For her, she says, it’s the solitude of the ocean where there’s no land in sight. “It’s being offshore where there’s nothing to distract you, no news. It puts into perspective what really matters in life.”
This from a woman who told a British sailing magazine, “Spending eleven months at sea, sailing through hurricanes, wallowing in the doldrums, and dodging fishing fleets. All with limited fresh food, water and sleep, and a toilet mostly titled at 45 degrees. What’s not to like?”
The racers left Southampton, England, on August 31, crossing the Atlantic to South America on the first leg, then back across the Atlantic to South Africa on the second leg, around the Cape of Good Hope through the Roaring 40s on to Western Australia on leg three, then a short one to Eastern Australia. After that, the race went to China and then across the Pacific to Seattle. The next leg will take the fleet south to the Panama Canal, through the canal, then north to Cape Charles, Va., the Chesapeake and the Potomac River into Washington.
They’re expected to arrive in Washington in early June for a 10-day stopover before the last leg back to England. According to Events DC, the 2024 stopover at the Washington Wharf drove $7.2 million dollars into the local economy.
The last time she was in the Bay, Hebron said she reflected on that first sailing adventure and her family and a picture of her and her brother from that time. And she felt like she had achieved something to get back.
And she said she’s sure that coming up the Chesapeake again, “it will be a moment to reflect, to come into port.”
