Tapio Lehtinen is a lifetime sailor and
keenly in love with the Oceans of the World.

Tapio’s first circumnavigation took place in 1981, as he participated in the Whitbread Round the World Race as the watch captain onboard Skopbank of Finland. The second round was the Golden Globe Race 2018, in which he finished 5th. Thousands of barnacles stuck to the bottom of his boat made the journey arduous. Still, with the true Finnish spirit, Tapio sailed and crossed the finish line and became the first Finn to have raced single-handed nonstop around the world.

It’s fair to say the first GGR competition left Tapio with a bone to pick with the barnacles. He wanted to give himself and her beloved Asteria boat another chance, and in September 2022, he started the Golden Globe Race 2022, ready to fight for victory seriously. Everything was going smoothly, and Tapio was sailing second in the race. But then, on Friday, 18th November 2022, dramatic news reached us: Asteria had suddenly sunk. Tapio spent about a day on the life raft, after which his fellow competitor Kirsten Neuschäfer rescued him to her boat. From Kirsten’s boat, Tapio boarded the cargo ship Darya Gayatri, which took him to Indonesia and finally back home.

His following big race was in 2023 Ocean Globe Race 2023, the 50th-anniversary race of Whitbread, which was first sailed in 1973. Like the GGR, the OGR is sailed with traditional boats and methods. For this race, Tapio gathered a group of next-generation ocean sailors. Their boat was the classic Swan 55 yawl, Galiana, which the team prepared for the round-the-world sailing that started in September 2023.