Gwinnett Woman Has Adventure of a Lifetime

Heather Stephens of Duluth, an employee of De Lage Landen, a global asset finance company with an office in Duluth, has just completed the adventure of a lifetime. As part of a corporate team-building exercise, she spent almost two months crewing on a De Lage Landen-sponsored clipper ship in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race.

Stephens boarded the clipper ship April 14 for Leg 7 of the race, a 5,129-mile journey from San Francisco through the Panama Canal to New York. After arriving in New York, the ship left Thursday (June 7) on the final part of the race from New York across the Atlantic Ocean to South Hampton, England.

The race, which started in Portsmouth, England, is expected to end in late July after covering 40,000 nautical miles. About 300 De Lage Landen employees from the U.S. corporate headquarters in Wayne, PA; Duluth, and Des Moines cheered the ship and crew as it arrived recently in New York. DLL is based in The Netherlands.

The De Lage Landen clipper ship, the only corporate entry, was in second place among 10 ships in the race as it departed from New York. The trip was conceived as a way to unite the company’s 5,400 staff members worldwide. De Lage Landen has clients in 35 countries. The crews include DLL staff from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Stephens, 27, will be returning to Duluth after visiting the Wayne, PA, office and sharing her experiences aboard the ship. During her portion of the race, Stephens kept in touch with co-workers by blogging about the ship’s progress on the company Internet site.

She works in sales development for DLL supporting clients in America and Canada interested in agricultural equipment vendor financing programs. De Lage Landen’s Duluth office is located at 4205 River Green Parkway.

“It was like a metaphor for work and life because there are challenges,” Stephens said, “and sometimes you don’t always have what you want, but you make the most of what you have and strengthen your relationships.”

Not only was there a lot of hard work involved in crewing the ship, but there were periods when there was not enough wind to fill the sails, and the ship was stalled. Stephens kept the crew’s morale up by baking chocolate chip cookies that she called “Clipper Chippers.”

For more information about the race, click here.