Daring Helen Armour went to extraordinary lengths to ensure she took part in the world's toughest yacht race.

The 37-year-old jacked in her job as marketing manager for Panorama Holidays after seeing coverage of the BT Global Challenge on TV.

Helen is among an 18-strong crew making final preparations for a ten-month long voyage across the globe's most unforgiving seas in the race.

Helen, of Coleridge Street, Hove, will circumnavigate the world aboard a 72ft steel ocean racing yacht where she will face gale force winds, rolling waves and the prospect of icebergs and sharks.

After the last challenge in 1996, she decided to quit her job and take to the ocean.

"It's really something I have wanted to do since I was 14. I heard that people took part in such things and it was something that I decided I wanted to do."

The race, which starts on September 10, will take competitors from Southampton to Boston in the US, then south to Buenos Aires, Wellington, Sydney, Cape Town and La Rochelle, France, before returning home.