The Port of Helsinki sponsors Tapio Lehtinen and his sailing team. By participating in international competitions, their goal is to get both the public and the press to talk about the state of the oceans. Sailing uses a carbon dioxide-free fuel.

“It would be impossible to equip our boats without sponsors, but we choose them with care. We want to cooperate with companies that are part of the solution in our transition towards a carbon-neutral circular economy. The Port of Helsinki wants to be a forerunner in sustainable port operations, so it’s easy for us to represent it,” says Tapio Lehtinen.

Last year, he took part in the Golden Globe Race – a solo around-the-world sailing competition. In November, his journey was cut short by the dramatic sinking of his yacht, the Asteria, on the border between the Indian and Antarctic Oceans. Lehtinen is now preparing for the Ocean Globe Race, another around-the-world sailing race that will depart from Southampton in September. Like the GGR, it also uses retro boats and methods. Lehtinen will not embark on this journey alone, as he has gathered a next-generation team to compete with him.

“For me, sailing is like a time machine that can go back millions of years. You see life as it was before we descended from the trees. When albatrosses fly around the boat with their 360-centimetre wingspans, I find that, at 180 centimetres tall, I’m only half an albatross. They’ve been on the planet for 13 million years. Humans have been here for four million years, so we’re fairly recent newcomers.”

Lehtinen has seen the concrete impacts of climate change during his oceanic voyages. After returning to Finland in the wake of his unfinished race, he spoke about the sad changes he had witnessed.

“Compared to what I’d seen before, it almost felt as if the Atlantic was dying. One of the funniest things about sailing the oceans is that dolphins will circle around your boat.

But last autumn, on my way back from France after the sinking, I only saw dolphins about three times. In the old days, I would have seen them three times a day. And whales I only spotted twice. There used to be loads of them as well.”

“It’s said that the number of fish in the oceans has fallen to 40 per cent of what it was in the 1980s. The reason for this is both overfishing and an acidification of the seas caused by climate change. That’s a major and very alarming change.”