Teen sailor Jessica Watson
Ocean racing has traditionally been about rich men out-maneuvering each others’ fancy toys in wild seas, sometimes with fatal results. This year tradition has been turned on its head in Australia, where the annual Sidney-to-Hobart race will be about the 18-year-old girl skipper of a 38-foot yacht. Jessica Watson, whose solo circumnavigation of the globe earned her the record of youngest female to sail around the world nonstop and unaided, will captain a young crew of nine on the “Ella Baché Another Challenge.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Watson said the race will be an entirely new challenge for her, because sailing around the globe was about being “slow and steady,” while the Sidney-to-Hobart race is a sprint. Watson, who was a cautious and severely dyslexic child, does not consider her achievements heroic. “I’m an ordinary girl who believed in a dream,” she told the crowd when she sailed into Sydney Harbor upon completion of her round the world voyage in 2010. “You don’t have to be someone special or anything special to achieve something amazing.”
Read the full story here.
Dutch sailor Laura Dekker, 16
Dutch sailor Laura Dekker, now 16, set off quietly from Australia this fall and successfully crossed the Indian Ocean, arriving in South Africa in late November after 47 days at sea. To elude pirates in this notoriously dangerous sea, Dekker and her on-shore crew kept her positions a secret. The strategy worked, and now Dekker is readying herself for the next leg of her global circumnavigation. Dekker’s plan is to finish her solo trip before her 17th birthday in September 2012.
Here’s an excerpt from her blog on the day of her arrival in South Africa: “This last leg to Cape Town was really tough. On the last night coming in I reefed the mainsail three times and we rounded the Cape of Good Hope in five metres high breaking waves, Guppy going at 8 knots under the storm jib only. The 35 knots wind that were forecasted soon turned to 40 knots, then to 45 knots and finally to 50 knots with at times 55 knots gusts! This was more than what the storm jib could take, but for some reason it jammed rolling so I couldn’t furl it in… The small sail area left was too much and being knocked down was still a real possibility – it had to come down.”
” In the early morning light as I could barely figure out the huge mass of the Table Mountain nearing, its top rising high above into the clouds, I made my way to the foredeck where under multiple ice cold showers I managed to take the storm jib down. On this side of Cape Agulhas the water temperature drops significantly and for the first time since the Galápagos Islands I saw penguins and seals swimming around. With her now bare masts Guppy was still heeling heavily as we were heading for the harbor and I was blinded by all the water washing over and the rising sun shining straight into my eyes…” To read more of Dekker’s blog, click here.
