John Ridgway

(s/v English Rose VI) for his 327-day circumnavigation, with his wife to publicise the impending extinction of the mighty albatross (all 21 varieties are now on the endangered list). They voyaged, uninsured, unsponsored and funded entirely out of their own savings to collect more than 100,000 signatures to present to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation. They sailed down to Cape Town and onwards to the Southern Ocean Islands of Marion, Crozet and Kergeulen and then to Australia, New Zealand, the Falklands and back to London. The birds are being killed at an estimated rate of 100,000 a year by fishermen trailing 50-mile strings of hooks.