Heading south-west from Brighton Marina slowly, the five or six support boats peeled away and I was left alone with my Albin Vega 27, Fear. You ate when you were hungry, slept when tired and always kept sailing, no real sense of time passing. When I started sailing keelboats three years earlier, I’d been told that doing the Fastnet Race was something someone with my disability couldn’t do. She started sailing keelboats at the end of 2022 when, with sailing having been dropped from the Paralympic Games line up, she wanted something else to focus on. The Per Brohäll-designed 8.25m Albin Vega 27, inspired by Sweden’s interesting coastline, was designed to be tough with an encapsulated keel and keel-hung rudder.