Tapio Lehtinen // Finnish Sailing Legend and Circumnavigator
On the Wind Sailing
Andy Schell
4.8 • 593 Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2022
⏱️ 96 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
#353. Tapio Lehtinen is a legendary Finnish sailor who is preparing to race the Golden Globe Race this year, and the Ocean Globe Race in 2023. Tapio sailed the Whitbread Round the World Race as watch captain in 1980-81. He also completed an arduous Golden Globe Race in 2018, which made Tapio the first Finn to have raced single-handed nonstop around the world. In this episode, Andy and Tapio talk about the devastating war in Ukraine, raising children and losing loved ones, and, of course, offshore sailing. Follow Tapio's sailing programs at www.tapiolehtinensailing.fi
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I think we should all, as we are communicating internationally, we should all do, think what we can do to help the situation in Ukraine and at least take the pain of reading the news and understand what is happening. |
| 0:19.1 | And maybe we are the lucky |
| 0:25.6 | ones living in in democracy so so call your call or mail your senator and do what |
| 0:34.6 | what you can and contribute in any way materially or symbolically. |
| 0:45.4 | I have just agreed that I'm going to go and buy the flag of Ukraine |
| 0:51.5 | and we are going to host it on top of our sailing club pavilion tomorrow |
| 0:57.6 | and to show our respect for the Ukrainian people fighting for their lives. |
| 1:04.0 | It's being an American, you know, I just came back from the U.S. |
| 1:09.3 | It feels very distant there as most things do in America, because we're geographically isolated. |
| 1:14.9 | But living in Sweden and you being even closer to Russia and Finland and having a closer historical connection, it feels much close. |
| 1:24.3 | It feels uncomfortably close to home being now, you know, now living in Sweden and living in |
| 1:30.5 | Europe. And that, it's come to, it's like on our front door in that me as parents who are both |
| 1:38.7 | retired, they're, they've got a pretty big house across the street from where we live. They're going to take refugees because there's a bunch of Ukrainian refugees. |
| 1:48.9 | They're going to allow, they want to find people with small kids that they don't have to, |
| 1:53.9 | because in Sweden they're housed in gymnasiums until they can find them housing. |
| 1:57.6 | So they're going to try to find families with small kids that they can live in a real |
| 2:01.2 | house and take care of the small kids more easily. So I've never, as an American, we've |
| 2:07.2 | like, that's never been a thing that we've had to ever think about. So yeah, so I agree with |
| 2:13.5 | everything you just said there. And, and I'm going to to put this I'm going to put this section at |
| 2:18.6 | the very top of the show so that everyone gets to hear this before we go into what we talked |
| 2:22.6 | about because I agree it's very important yeah I think that maybe the thing which we |
| 2:27.9 | in in whole Europe should everyone get prepared for is that that Western Europe is far too much reliant on Russian energy. |
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