In 2002, I stopped on a bridge in Leeds on my way home from work and watched a man steer a canal boat underneath me with a mug of tea in his hand.

He wasn’t going home from work. That was his life.

The following week I quit mine.

That decision eventually led to learning to sail from scratch, building an RYA sailing school with my wife Irenka, losing most of what we’d built in the 2008 crash, starting again, and finally setting off from Greece in 2017 with three kids under twelve and no realistic idea what we were doing.

Eight years and more than 40,000 miles later, we sailed back into Greece having gone the whole way round.

Before all that, I’d been a computer-games artist, interior designer, graphics lecturer and furniture maker. I’ve also collected whale faeces for scientific research, which remains surprisingly difficult to work naturally into a CV.

Along the way I became a sailing instructor, boat-maintenance obsessive and, thanks to YouTube, the internet’s least likely authority on marine toilet repair.

Our voyage became Mothership Adrift and has been featured by the BBC, The Telegraph, Newsweek, Lonely Planet and Yachting Monthly.

My first nonfiction book, If You Want to Do It. Do It!, is about the adventure, but also the less photogenic bits: money, marriage, fear, failure, coming home and what happens after you finally do the thing you spent years dreaming about.

I now live in Brighton and write about what a bigger life actually gives you, and what it takes.