On Thanksgiving Day 1990, we got into just a horrible storm.

Worse than any nightmare I never had a going to sea.

The sea height, officially, was 65 feet, and we had 85 knots of wind.

The boat was capsized -- turned upside down -- four hundred miles west of Cape Horn.

It set off an emergency beacon.

Didn't know if it was operating or not, and just waited.

About an hour and a half after the capsized, we were upside down in the trimaran.

In about knee-deep water on the ceiling.

Another wave came along and picked the boat up and just threw it.

And we were re-righted.

The mast was shattered and the boat was filled with water after that, and we were able to find some refuge after that in the forward sail locker, behind a watertight bulkhead.

And it did have about four feet of water in it, but we pumped that out.

My mother and sisters were gathering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving Day, and we are scheduled to call in through the ham radio, and we didn't.

They knew we were in a storm, and so my mother ended up driving home, not knowing what our situation was, situation was and there were three messages on the answering machine.

The first one said, "This is the Coast Guard in New York.

Can you confirm that the distrust signal from Great American is real?"

The second was from Scott Air Force Base from the mid west, asking the same question.

And the third was from one of my sailing mentors from Rhode Island.

He said, "Mrs. Wilson.

This is Philip.

And, in the middle of the night, 17 hours later, we heard a new sound enter the cacophony outside, and it was low and Obviously the ship was there to find us.

I had known from previous studies of trade routes of the world that there was only one ship along that route from Australia New Zealand around Cape Horn per week, and so we were obviously incredibly lucky that that ship was upwind of us and able to find us.

The ship was 815 feet long.

It was the largest refrigerated containership in the world.

It you took the John Hancock Tower in Boston and laid it down on its side, the ship was bigger than that, and that's what they were able to maneuver and put alongside us.

It was incredible.

Our boat is going up and down in the seas.

The ship is rolling through 60 degrees itself, and we had that one chance that you see in the movies to jump for a rope ladder hanging down from the side of the ship.

And we were able to get on board the ship that way.

I called in to the sisters.

One of my nephews drove up to Marblehead to be there with her through the night, and there was no news.

And then when we got on board ship, finally, it was about three o'clock in the morning, and Cape Horn is on the same time zone as Massachusetts.

So then I was faced with whether I should call home, but maybe startled or scare my mother -- wake her out of sleep, or if they had some inkling that there was something wrong, she could have some relief from that and know that we were okay.

So I did call and she answered the phone and said, "Hello."

And I said, "Hi mom."

She said, " Richie, where are you?"

And I said, "Well, I'm on a ship."

And you could just hear this huge sigh of relief knowing that something else had obviously happened.

Many years ago I was a school teacher in the Boston public schools, and what I learned was that, when I brought in real-world problem sets into my mathematics classes, that the kids paid much more attention.

And so, later on, when I was exposed to science programs in the field, and I could see how engaged so students were, I thought, well we can't send the middle school students to the rain forest or to sea, but perhaps we could connect the sea to middle school students, and we could bring, therefore, live science, live geography, and a live physics problems and so forth into the classroom in a very orchestrated way.

The mission of sites alive is to excite and engage students in learning.

When we began sites alive we started with something that I knew something about, which was sailing.

And we started with a long sailing voyage, which was from San Francisco to Boston around Cape Horn.

And the idea there was that it will be a long enough voyage to be able to get all sorts of school topics in.

You would have some drama with Cape Horn, of course, and that would excite kids.

And we would have some history in it as well because we were trying to break a clipper-ship-era sailing record.

I was quite early on line, and so originally we did it with Compuserve in 1990 for the capsize voyage.

We had a couple of Q&A going back and forth.

But in a 1993 we found a much better source, which was one of the proprietary online services named Prodigy, which was the biggest the time.

It was the only one that could do any kind of graphics at all.

And so we approached WGBH in Boston that had a program called Nova, and they were doing some of their Nova TV programs, but doing an online version, and we were there therefore able to get connected into Prodigy, and they followed us.

It was called Ocean Challenge live.

And at the end, we asked them how successful it had been, and they said, well we have two million members -- ten percent of our members were following regularly -- 100,000 hundred adults, 100,000 kids.

And this is just spectacular.

We were getting 200 questions a day from their audience about all sorts of things going on at sea, and that as much as anything proved the concept of live interactive learning adventures.

Since then we've done 75 interactive, full semester-long, three-month-long programs from all over the world.

As a sailor, I knew about the race called the Vendee Globe, and I never had any interest whatsoever and racing this race.

It's too hard, it's too long, it's too dangerous, the boats are too far from land for help.

And yet, it might provide an opportunity to create a truly global school program because the course of this race is around the world single-handed, non stop.

It leaves from France, it goes south through the Atlantic, you turn east past South Africa.

You go across the Indian Ocean, you go south of New Zealand, you go across the Pacific Ocean, around Cape Horn, back up through the Atlantic and finish in France.

And so this uniquely global event -- there are no other sports event that goes around the world -- with drama -- usually half the fleet doesn't finish the race for reasons of breakdowns or loss of vessels.

They've lost a few skippers along the way as well.

The drama of the event will engage the school kids.

Oceans had become finally an acceptable topic of the interest that perhaps we could build us as a live ocean expedition.

We weren't going to say say this is a French yacht race -- this was going to be a live ocean expedition, and we could get students from other countries involved.

And if you could get a conversation from a student in Beijing talking to a student in Bogota talking to a student in Boston, well that would be really interesting.

And you could use this unique global event as a unique unifying school program and excite kids along the way.

Get them to learn, get them to be exposed to other students around the world as well.

That was the goal of sailing the Vendee Globe.

In the 2008-2009 race, we started in the Bay of Biscay in November.

The race had a huge storm and it really decimated the fleet.

Of the 30 boats, nine boats had to go back, and four of those boats were damaged so severely that they were not able to resume the race.

Three of those four boats were brand new boats, built specifically for that race.

We got through that storm -- well, the boat did.

I did not.

I got thrown across the cabin and ended up breaking one or two ribs.

It was because I let go for one instant.

The boat hit a wave right then, knocked the whole boat sideways.

I got thrown.

The rib takes about a month to heal.

Over the course of the next three weeks, really getting down in the South Atlantic, it was extremely painful.

In the beginning I couldn't get into the bunk on the boat because the configuration of the boat required contortions.

It wasn't until I got into the Indian Ocean that I actually was able to climb into the bunk.

When I finally was able to get into the sleeping bag I had a couple of good sleeps, in the Indian Ocean, through all these gales -- the worst part of it all.

I think I slept for two hours one time which was just -- well you can't imagine.

The Vendee Globe is raced in a class of boats called an Open 60.

They are 60 feet long, six-foot bowsprits, normally about 18 feet wide, 90 foot mast.

They will surf down seas.

The boats have hit up to over 30 knots, which is more than I ever want to see.

I've never seen that -- I've seen in the 20s and that's quite enough.

If you remember when the America's Cup used to be sailed in Newport, the boats have a similar sail plan, but you don't have the extra 10 guys on the boat.

And you don't come in for lunch, either.

When we first decided to enter this race, and to try to create the global school program, I can tell you that in the back of my mind, one of my great fears was always, what happens if I have to climb the mast and make a repair, alone, at sea, in the south.

There are stories of sailors in this race going aloft and just getting creamed -- because different from a mountain climber going up ropes, where the rope is fixed, it's fixed.

And where our rope is fixed is waving around in the sky.

So, I went along through the race, got all the way towards Cape Horn, across the deep south, which was the worst part of this, and then there came an occasion where there was something broken aloft.

I either had to never make a mistake for the last eight thousand miles of the race back to France, or I could go aloft and try to fix the problem.

And I was able to do it -- make the repair, come back down, and I can tell you I was completely exhausted at the end of that.

A huge amount of stress.

The first two gales we had of seven gales were hurricane force.

And so when those are coming along, you watch them coming along on the weather maps, and you know you're just gonna get hammered and there's nothing you can do about it.

You can maybe modify where you are so that you'll be perhaps on the proper side of a weather system, but that's really the best you're going to be able to do, and you don't know whether you're going to come out of it -- you just don't know what's gonna happen.

You're just waiting for something to go wrong on the boat.

Racing an Open 60 single-handed is like having a premium cable subscription where all of the channels are on one monitor and they're all going at the same time.

There's the weather channel, there's the Food Channel, there's the motorcycle repair shop guys, there's history -- everything is going on at once -- it's absolute multiple channels going full on, all the time.

And you're repairing things.

OK, we got to make some fresh water with the desalinator.

We got to make a sail change.

We got to get the next weather map.

We got to repair that winch.

We got to aloft.

I got to charge the batteries.

Somewhere in there I gotta sleep.

It's just on and on and on and on.

During the course of the race I slept two times for four hours -- that was straight.

And those who are both by mistake.

Basically I just conked out on the keyboard at the chart table.

So the sleep deprivation is really serious because by that point it has accumulated.

I've had hallucinations in the past.

I had one semi-hallucination this time as well where I imagined I had to download a 20-ton anchor through the satellite telephone to the boat.

I don't know whether that idea came while I was asleep or whether I was just waiting, or was in a daydream or what -- but the problem that I foresaw was not that you can't download the 20-ton anchor through the satellite telephone, it was that our high baud rate satellite telephone was malfunctioning -- the 56 K baud rate -- and I would have to download this through the 2.4 K baud rate Iridium satellite telephone, and this was just going to take forever.

And I know I agonize about that for about 18 wide awake hours.

So that was not in a dream.

I was agonizing And then just eventually just realized, no you don't have to do that.

Maybe I had a nap or something and it was enough to set the record straight.

At one point there, coming up the Atlantic, it was just so hard.

It was so long, it was up wind.

We were I called Dr.. Barnewolt and said, OK, you're the emergency doc.

You got me through broken ribs and you got me through the neck and the big eye gash -- now you got to turn into a shrink and helped get me home.

So he would call every couple of days and let me talk, and that's what I really needed.

So when I came back from that race, I was really physic ally, mentally, emotionally spent.

I was at sea 121 days, 17 weeks, 28,798 ninety miles on the GPS at the end of the race.

It's incredibly hard, it's incredibly tiring, but it is everything that's embedded within our teacher's guide and curriculum standards of science, geography, math.

We were delivering all that.

That's what really made it meaningful to me.

When I finished that race, without trying to be dramatic about it, I thought that there was some chance that But over the course of time, I started to rethink that, and, really, the people who started to bring me back And so the kept asking, will you be back for 2012 or 2016?

And I would originally respond with No, one time per lifetime.

I thought I needed a better answer than that, so I started to think about what it would take to come back and do it again.

If there is any disappointment in actually finishing the 2008 Vendee Globe it was that we know we had interest from all over the world to you publish our K-12 series.

But we just ran out of time -- to be able to pull that all together.

So we're starting early now -- two and half years ahead of time.

We have the boat, We're sitting on it, right now.

The goals are to create global programs for K-12, which is what we've done for twenty years with SitesAlive.

For asthma -- for that constituency -- I have had asthma since I was a one year old kid -- severe asthma -- and I take four drugs a day to manage that.

And I know, that when I was a kid, if I could have seen someone, anyone, doing something, anything, who had asthma that that would have been hugely useful to me -- to see that people could still do the things they wanted to try to do, even though they had asthma.

And the third constituenciy now is seniors, because I was the oldest skipper in the 2008 race, at 58, and I will be 66 for the 2016 race.

And there's all sorts of things that we can use that sort of race for the seniors constituency -- to say look, turn off the TV, get off the sofa, you're not finished yet.

To teach about nutrition, to teach about fitness, to teach about sleep.

So all of those things, together, are the reasons to try to race this race in 2016.

This is a solo race, but the skipper is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the team goes.

We have our sitesAlive team, which will be producing the outreach programs, but we also have our boat team, led by Joph Brown and Rachel Oliver, who are our boat and electronics and gurus.

They have done all of this before.

And then boat was refit up in Portland, Maine, at Maine Yacht Center, with Brian Harris, who is the only American who has dealt with these boats over the course of the last decade and a half.

Those folks have been helping us put this together because they get the point -- they want to make this not only a big national program but a global program as well.

You're in the race.

You have to race the race.

You do the best for respect for yourself, for respect of your competitors, so that if they beat you, they know that they've beaten your best -- so you keep charging along, going as fast as you can.

But that's not the primary objective.

We know from the 2008 race that we're the only ones who were doing -- within the competitors, within the race -- we were the only ones who were trying to do something like this.

So oftentimes people say, well, how did you do that?

And I say, I spent about two hours a day working on our outreach programs.

For all of our voyages, and the Vendee Globe in particular, where you're so far from that the connection I have to make those programs really work, the kids will help bring me home.

And that's the most important thing.

We certainly wouldn't be doing this race if, for me, if we didn't have those outreach programs.

That what the objective is.