Student Sarah Aynesworth is counting down the hours to Thursday when she starts a frantic trip of a lifetime - into the record books.
The 22-year-old has battled her way through a series of gruelling selection tests to become part of a team aiming to sail round the world in under 80 days.
Sarah, from Hartlington near Burnsall, will be one of the crew of the 115ft stabilised monohull Cable & Wireless which has been specially built for the 26,000-mile attempt.
In the months since passing the initial selection she has been hard at work learning new sea skills.
"The whole thing has been quite arduous," she said. "But I've learnt and done so much."
The training has included escaping from a cockpit underwater, going up Snowdon, learning to fight on-board fires, using a radio and mastering the art of navigation.
Sarah has already spent a month in China with the Yorkshire Schools Exploring Society and has worked in a leper colony in Pakistan for eight weeks.
But her sailing experience so far has been limited to a family boating holiday on Loch Ness.
"We have done a lot of sea trials and I've been okay, but last week end on the Channel I was a bit seasick," she said.
"I've never known anything like it but about 70 per cent of the crew were ill too so I didn't feel so bad."
The Cable & Wireless boat leaves Gibraltar on Sunday and will pass though 15 ports and the Suez and Panama canals.
"We are aiming to do the trip in 76 days if nothing goes wrong," she said. "We should be back in Gibraltar on July 3."
The current circumnavigation record for a powered vessel is 83 days, nine hours and 54 minutes - set up in 1960 by the American nuclear submarine USS Triton.
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