Conrad Colman will launch the first New Zealand-flagged entry into the Ocean Race since 2012 in the next edition. He shares tales from his career on the open ocean so far with Christopher Reive.
From the middle of the ocean, no one can hear you scream.
Conrad Colman learned that lesson becalmed on the Atlantic, voice hoarse from venting, as he attempted the 2016 Vendée Globe – a non-stop solo around the world yacht race.
“I realised that I was not doing anything that was going to be productive, so I’ve managed to get a handle on my emotions since then,” the 41-year-old says.
It was a voyage 10 years in the making and – mentally and physically – put Colman through the wringer.
Born and raised in Auckland, Colman went to boarding school in the States at 15 and on to university in Colorado. While studying, he became a semi-pro mountain biker and started a company doing custom fabrication in titanium for bicycles.
Up in the altitude of the Rocky Mountains, he started to miss the sea.
That led to him tapping back into one of his old loves, becoming fascinated with ocean racing – a world that captivated him when the Whitbread Round the World Race arrived in Auckland in his youth.
That redeveloped interest led him to the Vendée Globe, and a decision to sell out of his company, and move to Europe with nothing but a waterproof bag of gear as he bet on himself to one day compete in the race.
Colman moved to the United Kingdom where he worked as a sailmaker and “marine industry odd jobs person” which helped him to learn ways to fix various problems on boats and, little by little, he began to gain sponsorship towards his major goal of the Vendée Globe.
He moved to France in 2009 at 23, bought a small third-hand boat and began to integrate himself into the solo sailing scene.
“I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have a house, I lived in the tiny little race boat on the northwest coast of France over winter,” he recalls.
“That made me super, super motivated to get my manoeuvres right and not chuck the spinnaker in the piss every time I took it down, because that was going to be my living space that night.
“It meant I got the spinnaker drops down pat because I was ultra motivated.”
After honing his skills and developing as a sailor over the next few years, Colman was able to launch a campaign for the 2016 Vendée Globe, realising the dream he had set out to chase.
A non-stop solo race around the world was always going to be tough, but it was far from a fairytale finish for the Kiwi adventurer.
“Ultimately, I was trying to do too much with too little, and the boat was not fully prepared.
“I had secondhand sails and secondhand this and that – and things started going wrong basically from day one. I had a solar-panel charger controller that failed and caught fire, so I had a fire on board in the South Atlantic. I had to rebuild the electrical system while sailing.
“Then I had failures with the autopilot that created some wear and tear on the boat, which was ultimately, I think, responsible for the rig coming down later on in the race.”
Despite his troubles, Colman was performing well, battling for a spot in the top 10 of the 30-strong fleet in a vessel he describes as an “old dunga”.
That was until, off the coast of Portugal and about 800 miles from the finish, he demasted; with the mast snapping the boom as it went off the side of the boat.
“The boat was pretty tired, it seems, and I went into one storm too many and one of the rigging cables failed.
“The mast came down, and that was in probably 45 to 50 knots, in 8m breaking swells... it was really annoying too, because I was not pushing hard at that point.”
He had lost his rig, he had lost his sails, and it coincided with him running out of food.
Colman admits that at that point in the race, after everything he had already been through, he felt like he had nothing more to give.
But not giving up had become something of a theme in Colman’s journey as his 17-year-old brother, Andrew Scott, committed suicide not long before the race.
Colman says he would have conversations with his brother during his time alone at sea.
“That was incredibly motivating, but in a really negative way,” Colman reflects.
“My whole race and all of the challenges that I had during that race were as if I were having a conversation with him by fighting for him when, unfortunately, he had chosen to give up.
“I wanted to prove to myself and prove to his memory that challenges are ephemeral. That even if it feels overwhelming – like you’ve got dark clouds, like you’ve got towering waves over your head – there is a way to get through it.
“That race and that source of motivation was very much a discussion with him. So it was a really dark, black energy – which can be incredibly powerful – but it’s a hard place to stay and not really a desirable place to stay in terms of a source of motivation.
“[They weren’t] really positive conversations, but I felt like I had to fight through that storm or fight through that challenge, and show him – or the memory of him – that you shouldn’t be giving up and that the sun comes up and the clouds go away and, God damn it, why couldn’t that have been understood earlier?
“That was the conversation, basically.”
So, when the sun came up the day after he demasted, Colman went to work constructing a jury rig – hoisting a makeshift sail using only what was available to him on board.
He broke into his emergency survival kit, plotted his course to the finish line and broke the biscuits from the kit into day-by-day rations.
For the next 10 days, Colman estimates he consumed about 300 calories – limiting himself to two broken biscuits – per day.
He did, however, arrive at the finish line, albeit 10kg lighter than when he departed, becoming the first New Zealander to complete the race, the first person to do it without the assistance of fossil fuels (not running the engine) and the first person to finish the race without any mast at all.
“What got me up and back fighting when the rig came down, was finally appreciating that all the struggles that I had earlier in the race had got lots of people queued into what I was doing and invested in the race, and I didn’t want to let them down,” he says.
“It was not just me on this 10-year odyssey, but an appreciation for the fact that other people had invested in it, other people had helped get me there.
“I was super committed to this idea of doing 100% renewable [resources] and being the first person to do that. That’s what got me back into it.”
The challenges of 2016 weren’t enough to discourage Colman, who again completed the most recent edition of the Vendée Globe, setting off from Les Sables-d’Olonne in the west of France on November 10 last year, spending Christmas and welcoming in the New Year alone at sea, before arriving back where it all started early in 2025.
This time around, however, Colman returned as a different person. Now a father of Ella, 7, and Leo, 4, and a man intent on finding the joy in everything he does in life.
Colman became affectionately known as the “Crazy Kiwi” on the circuit, taking every challenge in his stride and embracing what he calls a “happy warrior” mentality.
“It changed everything, and it was a very conscious decision on my part to totally reimagine my approach to challenges and hype myself up before the start of the race to see things in this way.
“And not just because of this race. I’ve now adopted that as my general philosophy, and sort of driving force. It’s a much better place to hang out.”
And while he didn’t lose his rig, there were still plenty of trials thrown his way on his most recent expedition.
On a rough night in the Southern Ocean, he had to drag his gennaker – his second biggest sail – back on board as he was pelted by heavy rain after the power of the waves had washed it overboard.
In a video update from on board, Colman admitted he thought he would lose the sail, but was able to get ropes around it and, little by little, winch it back on board.
He also dealt with damage to sails, electrical components and other equipment on the boat, but embraced the challenges being thrown at him and, in every update, was able to smile through the troubles.
But Colman also got to experience something rare, even to a Vendée Globe racer, when he came across an iceberg in the Southern Ocean.
“That was an incredibly stressful moment and tough to manage. It could well have been a really negative experience, because there was a lot of uncertainty relating to where the icebergs were going to be,” he reflects.
Colman says the sailors received an email from the race directors a couple of days before he came across the iceberg, saying they were heading into an ice exclusion zone.
However, in the rules of the race, once the first boat has gone past a certain point, race management won’t change the exclusion zone in order to maintain race parity.
It’s not something Colman agrees with, as he says it prioritises the race over sailor safety.
“They sent an email to us saying, ‘hey, obstacles up ahead, this is where they were last seen by the satellite observations, this is their approximate drift pattern. Good luck’.
“At that point, you’re either given the opportunity to go, OK, well, safety first, last and always, and do a huge diversion out and away, or try and maintain the fact that you’re in the race.”
At that point, Colman was in a close pack of racers and a big deviation to avoid the ice zone would be costly.
With the icebergs seeming to have a trend of drifting north, Colman made the call to sail as far south as he could and hope, in the meantime, they had followed that trend.
“As it turns out, the icebergs didn’t care about where I thought they were going to be and I ended up sailing towards one of them.”
In that area of the world, the water was so cold that the thermal imaging cameras he used to look for obstacles at sea struggled to differentiate sea from ice as they were around the same temperature.
It was purely by chance that he caught a glimpse of a large white mass floating on the ocean on the horizon in the safety of sunlight.
But because he knew there was one, he had to stay on alert as he made his way through the area, as not all icebergs sit above the water.
“A couple of sleepless days went into that. But I had the awareness of that moment going, OK, yes, this is dangerous, yes, this is a bit scary, but this is exciting and this is really cool because it’s rare,” he reflects.
“I felt like I had sort of travelled, not just through space, but through time, and had this incredible opportunity to live as the old Whitbread sailors did, because they didn’t have satellites looking to see whether the route was clear ahead of them, so ended up way, way down south and ended up amongst the icebergs themselves.
“It felt really cool to have this opportunity to go and see an iceberg and not only for the beautiful majesty of the object itself, but also what it represented and who were the last people out there that had seen them.
“It was a really special moment.”
The dangers of what he does have never been lost on Colman, whose father died in a yachting accident when he was less than a year old.
Around-the-world ocean racing has proven to be a dangerous endeavour with several sailors losing their lives in such competitions, including three Vendée Globe participants.
While that is the case, Colman says accidents can happen in any walk of life.
“In our normal lives, we’re surrounded by ever-present danger, only we don’t see it as such. Every time we cross the road, somebody could knock us over.
“That’s not a way of reducing the danger of what I do, but I’m very conscious of it, particularly because of family history.
“I’m thankful I’ve managed to incorporate an appreciation for the danger in a positive way, in the sense that it motivates me to be respectful of the danger; to look at it in its face every day, to know that when I step out of the cockpit, I am in danger.
“I clip on, I have a lot of respect for the power of the waves that come crashing over the boat. There are times that I have been overwhelmed by that; completely incapable of hanging on myself and resisting the force of the waves, and it is only by good practice and using the harness and the safety lines, that I stay on board the boat.
“It’s an ongoing conversation with the danger and the acknowledgement of the finality of it, if you do it wrong.”
Colman finished the 2024-25 Vendée Globe in 21st place, completing the journey in just under 86 days. There were 40 entries in the edition, eight of which did not finish.
Now, he is looking to get back on the open ocean – this time with a crew beside him.
Colman, alongside marine business and diplomacy expert Rowan Gyde, has launched Aotearoa Ocean Racing and will lead a New Zealand-flagged entry into the next edition of the Ocean Race (formerly the Whitbread and Volvo Ocean Race), which is due to start in January 2027.
It will be the first time since 2012 that New Zealand has had an entry into the famed competition, and Colman hopes they will be laying a platform for the future as they look to recruit a mix of young and experienced talents.
“Rowan and I feel strongly about our... responsibility back to the sailing community, to provide this opportunity to pick people up as they’re coming out of the pipeline of the high performance sailing development squads that exist, particularly the [Royal New Zealand Yacht] Squadron, and show them that there is a way forward and help to provide the next step. It’s an added motivation on our part.”
While Colman has plenty of tales from his journeys on the open ocean, he admits it won’t be a hard sell to sailors looking for their next adventure.
“You just need to think back to the ad that [Antarctic explorer Ernest] Shackleton put in the newspaper when he was putting his endurance campaign together to go to the South Pole and into Antarctica.
“It was basically four lines saying ‘you’re going to be uncomfortable, you’re not going to be paid, you’re going to live in ever-present danger, but we might do something cool’.
“It’s kind of the same lines here, only you’re going to be in a high-tech race boat, you’re probably going to be warm and dry for most of it, you have good food rather than pemmican, and you’ll probably get paid.”
Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.
A solid weekend saw the New Zealand crew back on the podium in SailGP's return.