Written by Kerry Gillespie, sports journalist, Toronto Star. Article published 16 August 2026.
The plastic bucket for a toilet was not the selling point on the second-hand 60-foot boat that Scott Shawyer purchased for $6 million.
The sails on the IMOCA 60 yacht are so big they would cover an NBA court, plus the courtside seating. It’s designed for both speed and to protect its skipper from the world’s most extreme ocean conditions, all of which made it a perfect fit for Shawyer.
The Collingwood resident sold his automation engineering firm in the midst of the COVID pandemic and set his sights on becoming the first Canadian to finish the Vendée Globe — the solo, non-stop race around the world through the most remote and hostile waters on the planet, encircling Antarctica. Two have tried before: one was lost at sea, the other forced out after his boat was flipped in a storm.
It’s a seemingly crazy undertaking for someone who grew up sailing on the calm waters of Georgian Bay, and perhaps that’s why the sailing media have used words like “unconventional” and “risk-taker” in describing Shawyer’s entry into the elite sport of ocean racing.
Sitting on his boat in Collingwood Harbour, Shawyer puts it differently: “If someone else can do it — why can’t I? No matter what it is.”
The Vendée Globe starts in Les Sables-d’Olonne, France, in November 2028. Sailors head south through the Atlantic to the bottom of the world, around Antarctica and past the three continental capes — Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn — that have filled adventurous and often tragic sailing stories dating back centuries, and then north to finish where they started.
It’s austere in its essential rules: no stops, no help, no resupply.
Why the Vendée Globe is the Everest of the Seas
It’s been nicknamed the Everest of the Seas as shorthand for an incredible personal achievement in the face of extreme conditions. But far more people summit Everest in a typical year than have completed this race in its entire four-decade history.
Only 100 skippers have ever finished the race — some more than once — held every four years since 1989.
In the 1996-97 race, Montreal’s Gerry Roufs was lost at sea roughly halfway between New Zealand and Cape Horn off South America, just about the furthest point from any land mass on earth. In one of his final communications before his locator beacon stopped transmitting, he says: “The waves are no longer waves, they are as high as the Alps.”
Photos: Richard Mardens, Canada Ocean Racing.
In the 2008-09 edition, New Brunswick-born Derek Hatfield had to withdraw after a storm 1,600-kilometres south of Australia capsized his boat and compromised his mast.
Watching the 2020 race start, where sailors pulled off their COVID masks and jumped aboard their boats, hit Shawyer hard. He felt chained to a desk, running his company while they were about to sail alone around the world.
“It’s the hardest sailing race, arguably the hardest sporting challenge on the planet,” he says of the race’s appeal.
But the real draw of two-to-four months at sea goes deeper: “Can my body make it? Can my mind survive it? You can’t buy your way to the end of the Vendée Globe. You’re there by yourself for three months battling the conditions. You have to manage the boat, you have to manage yourself. Nobody’s going to save you. There’s no Sherpa … There is no safety net.”
The 54-year-old says his family is “super supportive.” But, he adds, “if I said I wasn’t going to continue, they’d all breathe a sigh of relief.”
$3 million a year to chase an impossible dream
This may be the ultimate solo test, but it takes a team and a lot of dollars just to get to the start line. Shawyer figures it’s about $3 million per year to keep the boat on the water and compete in the series of shorter races he needs for experience and to qualify as one of the 40 boats allowed in the 2028 Vendée Globe.
His Canada Ocean Racing team, which now has a dozen staff spread across Canada, U.K. and France, started as a self-funded enterprise but Shawyer says the balance has now shifted to corporate sponsorship, including official partner H2O Innovation.
The Route du Rhum in November from France to Guadeloupe will be Shawyer’s first time solo racing the Emira IV, named after his daughters Emma and Keira. Its bow can lift out of water on foils for greater speed — and challenges.
He raced it alongside three crewmates in The Ocean Race Europe 2025, which meant two people could navigate and make constant sail adjustments to get the most speed while two others fixed things, cooked or slept.
Now, he has to do it all and know how to fix any mechanical, electrical or computer system that breaks down. He’ll sleep in micronaps when he can. Cooking is the easy part since the boat has no kitchen. It’s freeze-dried packets on a Jet Boil camping stove.
So far, he hasn’t found a reason to think he can’t do it. “Seasickness was close,” he says. “It’s the worst.”
In a lifetime of sailing, Shawyer had never suffered from it but this class of boat, which is entirely enclosed to protect the skipper from the speed and elements, has severely limited sightlines — a bit like navigating inside a submarine — and is violently bumpy.
“It’s like being put in a tin can and kicked down a staircase,” he says. The French skipper who previously owned this boat broke his neck when a wave pitched him through the cabin. Remarkably, he still finished that race.
The Emira IV is normally based in France, the epicentre of ocean racing, when it’s not in the shop in England. He brought it home to Collingwood this summer to lay the groundwork for a Canadian-based ocean racing program, spending his days practising solo and learning every inch of the 60-foot boat.
“Every time we take it out something breaks,” he says. “It’s a little daunting to think of what can happen.”
The Vendée Globe’s precursor was the Golden Globe, a non-stop event created by British newspaper The Sunday Times looking to capitalize on the excitement of Francis Chichester’s solo circumnavigation (with one stop) via the three capes. Nine men started that race in 1968 and 312 days later, British sailor Robin Knox-Johnston was the only one to finish it.
Famously, one disappeared at sea after falsifying his race logs and suffering a mental breakdown. Another sank near the finish and later died by suicide.
Shawyer has never sailed any of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and may not get there before the Vendée Globe, where he’ll face its legendary wind, waves and storms — all well beyond the reach of a quick rescue or possibly any rescue at all.
Still, when he thinks ahead to his ultimate ambition, he only sees himself succeeding.
“There’s no alternative. You have to have the belief, the unreasonable belief at times for sure,” he says.
And to help with that belief, he’s stopped reading sailing books.
Why?
“They’re scary.”