Written by Charlotte Thomas
20 July 2024
For some people, a passion for sailing starts early, often inspired by trips out on the water on a family yacht or through dinghy racing and other water sports. For others, the call of the sea comes later in life – and so it was for interior designer, businesswoman and philanthropist Wendy Schmidt.
As President of the Schmidt Family Foundation – which she co-founded in 2005 with her husband, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt – and as a passionate advocate for ocean conservation, science and restoration through her 11th Hour Racing and Schmidt Ocean Institute initiatives, Schmidt discovered the joys of superyachts and the importance of the ocean after her own children had flown the nest.
“I grew up in New Jersey, nowhere near the ocean,” Schmidt remembers. “I got to visit it with my family, where we would jump in the waves, getting sunburned and sandy before driving home in the station wagon! But I didn’t really know the ocean. I didn’t know it had anything to do with me.”
Looking back, she says there was a moment at age nine when she had exposure to a sailboat on a family holiday, and there’s a photo of her stretched out on the transom. “I’m looking up at the sun and look really comfortable on that boat,” she smiles.
“But I didn’t start sailing until mid-life, which tells me you can learn to sail at any point.”
Encouraged by a friend to buy a 45-footer to race, she quickly picked up the ropes. “I thought I would go out once in a while,” she says, “but I found myself going out every day for an entire summer. I just felt an intuitive connection to what was going on in a boat. That experience has continued, and it has led to a focus on ocean health because my eyes were opened to a world I had never really understood before.”
As well as investigating the use of sustainable materials and sustainable build practices when it came to building her own sailing superyacht, Schmidt also founded 11th Hour Racing – based on her 11th Hour Project initiative – to promote similar principles of sustainability throughout the yacht racing and yachting worlds.
As a sponsor for The Ocean Race – the round-the-world event at the pinnacle of professional ocean racing – and with yachts designed, built and competing under the 11th Hour Racing banner, (which their IMOCA 60 won in 2023), Schmidt says she has already seen a marked difference in attitudes among teams and visitors to the race.
“We’ve pioneered a new way of sponsoring races – instead of selling you a wristwatch, I’d like to sell you some ideas,” Schmidt explains. “If you go to a Race Village now during the Ocean Race, you’ll have a very special experience because it won’t be like any other public venue you go to – it was designed to have no waste, which means all the vendors organise everything to have no waste.
“I used to walk into the Race Village and see sailors, boats, technology – that’s not happening now; you walk into a Race Village and you’re talking about the ocean.”
Schmidt’s own experience of racing sailing yachts – she helms her own superyacht and other yachts she races on, and recently became the first female and first American to win the Barcolana 54 race – is paying dividends beyond just success on the water.
“I’m very solutions oriented,” she says. “I have a natural kind of optimism and believe people are more powerful when they work together.
“And this idea of a team on a race boat is a really good design for how we can think about approaching many problems in the world, including the idea of ocean.”
It’s something that also informs the work of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which works with scientists to study various facets of the world’s oceans, and whose inventory includes not only cutting-edge technologies but also a research vessel – the first was named Falkor, which has recently replaced by the 110-metre research vessel Falkor (too) – that is made available to scientists to conduct research.
Indeed, says Schmidt, they have hosted more than 1,000 scientists on board since the first Falkor was refitted in 2012 and went into service with the institute. And there is, she explains, a 10-year plan to be in all seven ocean basins – “We’re coordinating with the other operators of vessels around the world so that they know where we’re going to be, and we can stage the work we all do together a little more collectively.”
Schmidt also believes the superyacht industry has a key role to play in preserving and restoring our oceans. “Things can be better,” she asserts. “And we should all, in our industry and in our recreation as sailors, try to make ourselves part of the solution instead of being part of the problem.
The first step is to recognise what’s wrong, and the second is to talk about how to change that and to do that together. What’s really important,” she continues, “is for the industry to educate themselves as well as owners, builders, in fact everyone in the industry, about what our impact on the ocean really is.”
Moreover, she says that we all have a part to play, whether we’re boaters or not. “If you think there isn’t a role for you; there is. If you think you’re too small to make a difference; you’re not,” she declares. “If you look at the scale of the universe we live in, and the systems we study and we work with in all of our philanthropy, there’s a place for every kind of scale from the smallest microscopic subatomic particle all the way out to the largest structure in the universe.”
It’s the kind of thinking about the conservation of our planet that led to Schmidt receiving a Bowsprit award at The Honours in 2023, an event organised by the non-profit Superyacht Life Foundation and the Monaco Yacht Show to recognise extraordinary people in and around the superyacht community who are making an extraordinary difference in the world and inspiring change in the industry and beyond through their actions.
“Think of the ocean as a big life support system for all of humanity,” she continues. “And when we get that in our head and we understand – either as boat operators, builders, sailors, people who have never got on a boat or never even seen the ocean – all of us together are part of the solution because we really want the winner to be the ocean. When the ocean wins,” she concludes, “we all win.”