Coming up on Hold Fast.
I'm just done, and all my Italian fire is burning me.
And I see the land so close, and yet so far, again and again and again.
I'm just going to throw myself into the water, I'm going to swim ashore.
Try to stop me.
This is the extraordinary story of sailing cargo ship the Avantour and its crew of 15 on a wind-powered mission to transport olive oil,
cacao, coffee and rum between Europe and Central America.
But before they even make it halfway, everything they're counting on is thrown to the winds.
I'm Siobhan McSweeney and you're listening to Lives Less Ordinary Presents.
Hold fast.
From the BBC World Service.
It's early June 2020,
and the Avantour crew are now approaching four months since they last set foot on land.
They're bound for the Azores in the mid-Atlantic Ocean,
but having sailed further north than planned,
they find themselves in the icy seas around the island of Newfoundland,
Canada's most eastern province.
For ships cook Julia Boccosi, it's her first time in these waters.
The banks of Newfoundland is a very particular place
because the seabed rises from thousands of meters of open Atlantic to roughly 180 meters.