Life coach reveals how a near-death experience shipwrecked at sea gave her the courage to change course

I had a dysfunctional childhood. I was born in Wigan, in Lancashire – northern England – in 1963 and I have a twin brother and a sister who is three years younger. When I was four, we moved to Cheshire, a county not far from Lancashire, and I grew up in Lynn, an upmarket rural community.

My mum was very unstable. She threatened to commit suicide quite a few times and had mental health problems, which were not understood back then. After many years of misery, my parents divorced in my early years of high school. Mum took all the money she was entitled to out of the house and dad went into a lot of debt to pay her off.

He worked for Seagrams, a large Canadian drink company, dealing with wines and spirits, and left for work at 6am and we had to get ourselves to school. We knew we were different from the people we were growing up with because we didn’t have a mum at home and money was tight. Although we lived in beautiful part of Cheshire, the experience was quite miserable.

Family values

When I was 18, I got on a management training scheme with Marks and Spencer, the British retail chain, and that was the start of my working career. When I was 21, I met Raymond (Lee), who was an actuary at Royal Insurance in Liverpool. He was seven years older than me, had two degrees, and was intelligent and interesting – he had a lot going for him. He offered me more.

I wanted to travel and see the world. We got married in June 1986 and Hannah was born the following May. We had a son two years later and another son two years after that. By the time I was 28, I had three children under five.

Raymond’s (Chinese) mum disowned him when she found out he was seeing a Western woman. I didn’t expect her to be so racist, especially after I’d had three kids and two of them were boys.

Shipping out

In 1991, the UK was entering a recession and although Raymond is a really smart guy, he wasn’t getting paid what he was worth. In 1994, when a job opportunity came up to move to Hong Kong, we sold the house. By the time we’d paid off everything, we got on the plane with £3,000 cash.

My mum didn’t want me to move to Hong Kong because she didn’t want the grandkids to go, and she caused me a lot of trouble so in the end I disowned her. We initially lived in Discovery Bay on Lantau Island and my dad came with us for a year to help settle the kids.

People would say to me, “You’re married to a Chinese person but normally it’s the other way around.” I feel like throughout my life I’ve been labelled as the odd one out who doesn’t do everything as expected.

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All aboard

Raymond was headhunted several times and ended up with Citibank, a multinational bank, and did really well. He was at the top of his profession, but sadly the work took him away from me and the kids. He was never there, never available and, when he was around, he was stressed and irritable.

I’d always fancied the idea of learning to sail and Raymond liked the idea of it. So the whole family learned. In 2002 we had a 50-foot yacht, Purple X, built and shipped to Hong Kong, and we went sailing pretty much every weekend.

It wasn’t always relaxing as Raymond could be quite bossy. It wasn’t just lie back and drink champagne; we pushed ourselves because Raymond wanted to sail around the world.

In 2005, when the kids were teenagers, we moved onto a huge houseboat in Aberdeen on the south side of Hong Kong Island – it had five bedrooms and four bathrooms. With a view to sailing around the world, we had a 63-foot boat on order, but I was apprehensive; I felt there were a lot of things that could go wrong.

Brief encounter

In 2007, a friend was over from the UK and we went to a pub in Wan Chai to watch the rugby. We got chatting to some guys and that’s when I met Martin. He ran a security company and had just got off a plane that was supposed to be taking him to a job with Tiger Woods in Shanghai.

He didn’t realise he needed a visa, so the next day I helped him get one at China Travel and we stayed in touch.

There was not much going on work wise in the UK for Martin, so he moved to Hong Kong to be in security in Asia. He didn’t go back to the UK for Christmas because his ex-wife had their daughter for the holiday, and I asked if he wanted to join us sailing to the Philippines because we needed an extra pair of hands.

Trouble at sea

The trip to the Philippines was preparation for our round-the-world trip. The whole family, Martin and two other crew sailed to Subic Bay off the island of Luzon. It took five days and we had a nice Christmas holiday in the Philippines. Hannah and one of the crew flew back to Hong Kong and the rest of us, plus Victor, a Filipino boat boy hanging around Subic Bay, sailed back.

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We knew there would be rough weather, but it wasn’t anything we hadn’t seen before. Early in the morning a couple of days into the journey, the carbon fibre mast shattered and went over the side, taking the sails with it.

Once you’ve lost your sails and rigging, you lose your stability. It also cracked a hole when it went overboard so water was entering the boat and our electrics started to smoke, so we had to turn those off. The situation was looking worse by the hour.

Tanker rescue

I was down below deck on the satellite phone and radio trying to summon help. Helicopters couldn’t come because it was too far without refuelling at an oil rig, and it was too windy for that. A Maersk tanker came to rescue us. The lifeboat that Maersk sent got damaged during the rescue attempt, and Raymond and two crew were injured.

With the rescue boat not fit for purpose, they threw rockets with lines and rings towards us. The boys went and were dragged up the side of the ship. Finally, it was me and Victor, but we lost contact with the ship because, as we jumped into the water, the yacht rammed us and was going to trap me between it and the ship, so they had to let go of me.

The yacht went off – I never saw it again – and the ship went off, and Victor and I were left in the ocean. It was a 42-knot (50mph) wind and 10-metre (30ft) swells by this time. I thought I was going to die and promised myself that, if I got to see the end of the day, I’d change my life and live one that was meaningful; it couldn’t be centred on making money.

They turned the ship around three times before they could collect us and on the final approach had only two life rings left. We were being dragged several hundred yards under the waves. They lowered a cargo net and we climbed into it.

I was hypothermic and they put me in a thermal insulation suit. Raymond had a horrific leg injury, one of the crew had a broken back and another had split his head open.

Fallout

When we got back to Hong Kong, that’s when the fallout occurred. I hadn’t been happy for five or six years because I was lonely – Raymond was never there. We had plenty of money, but I wasn’t happy. We agreed on a separation for a few months so I could figure things out.

My youngest son was about to go to university. I’d been there for the kids all that time, but now I wanted to make my own way. Martin did say he’d developed feelings for me over that Christmas holiday, but I needed to leave the family unit before I could think about that.

He went to the United States for work for a few months and we stayed in touch. When I said I wasn’t going back to Raymond, he came back to Hong Kong. I started to see him a bit more and, eventually, we got together. I had been working in a school as a career adviser and administrator and then requalified as a counsellor.

Fresh start

Martin and I married in 2019 and this May we moved to Cornwall in southwest England and into an old granite-mine captain’s house that we bought in 2013. It’s the house Martin grew up in. My twin is renovating a cottage five doors along from us. We’ve not been together since we were 16 and we turn 60 next year.

I’ve retrained as a life coach. Coaching is powerful because you don’t put people in boxes, you help them explore where they want to go with what they have. That’s what I ended up doing when I found the courage to change my life.

I look back to that day when I nearly drowned and I think of all the things I would never have seen if not for that captain and his amazing seamanship with a 130,000-tonne (143,000-ton) tanker in a raging storm – I’d never have seen my kids get married and I’d never have met my three grandchildren.