Percy landed more jobs after that, from mate on a 45-foot schooner to skippering a 53-foot Swan, to progressively larger yachts. We sailed back to London – it was the end of their round-the-world trip.” That was in the late 1970s and I wasn’t being paid – but we sailed up to Thailand, where I came across another boat that was paying which I joined as deckhand. “So I landed on an old topmast gaff-rigged schooner. “I was in a doss-house in Singapore and saw a little sign saying ‘deckhand wanted’,” he says. The travel bug was still biting though, and after giving up teaching to go travelling Percy landed in the right place at the right time. I ended up going off and teaching for three years.” When I left university I wanted to get into yachting but at that time you only really had the occasional ad for a deckhand in the back of sailing magazines, so I couldn’t find a job. “I knew I had the travel bug,” he says, “and I loved boats – I felt excited being on a boat because you’re close to the water. “I was turfed off there one summer by my parents, I think to get me out of the way! I got my RYA Instructor qualification when I was 16 and ended up teaching at the sailing school in the Easter and summer holidays, and then I started racing.”Īfter school, Percy went to university and completed a degree in teaching, but the call of the boats was strong. “When I was young, just up the road there was quite a large loch and a sailing school,” he begins. Percy grew up in the countryside of Perthshire, just north of Glasgow in Scotland, and had his first taste of the life aquatic as a youth. For Captain Gordon Percy, who is approaching 50 years as a professional sailor and skipper, the pathway was perhaps a combination of both – part inevitability, and part luck. Sometimes people arrive in yachting via the most unlikely routes, and sometimes their superyacht destiny seems shaped from childhood.
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