Team Spirit—Life and Leadership on One of the World's Toughest Yacht Races

Team Spirit is a gripping account of a race on the edge, and a young skipper's determined journey to victory. The Clipper Round the World Yacht Race is the ultimate long-distance challenge—a thirty-five-thousand-mile circumnavigation of the globe contested by amateur crews in identical racing yachts—a thrilling test of endurance, skill, focus, and determination. The 2010 winner was led by the youngest and least experienced skipper in the race, twenty-eight-year-old Brendan Hall, and his crew in Spirit of Australia.

This book is Hall's story and readers will learn how his phenomenal win was no accident, but the culmination of expert training, skilled navigation, and an innate leadership quality well beyond his years. Drawing on heretofore untested skills and courage, Hall also heroically came to the aid of an injured skipper in a competing yacht during the race and guided both boats across one of the most feared oceans in the world in the middle of a North Pacific hurricane! Hall's brutally honest, no-holds-barred account is revealing and instructive and resonates with valuable lessons in leadership, management, life lessons, and perseverance.

Brendan Hall began sailing at the age of four in his home waters off Brisbane, and was twenty-seven years old when the 2009–10 Clipper Round the World began. He transformed a motley crew of eighteen amateur sailors into a race-winning sailing machine, as all while battling hurricane conditions and gear failure, and rescued two other yachts in the northern Pacific Ocean.