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We had spent three months on a 60-foot yacht sailing across the world's most brutal ocean. A year before I had done virtually no proper sailing, so to be thrown in at the very deep end was a little scary at times," he admitted.

The timing of the completion of the trip was a lucky coincidence, he wrote.

"The cunning truth is that my 21st birthday was the day after our arrival so I could celebrate in normal conditions after the two previous years were spent in a tent," he wrote.

The two youths were fresh out of prep school -- the equivalent of high school -- and had no special training for their epic trek.