Teen girl sailor revolutionizes ocean racing

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.

Tagged as: Jessica Watson, Sidney-to-Hobart race