A 60-Foot Boat, a 5-Foot-2 Woman, a 94-Day Race to Fame

In France, they lighted the sky with fireworks for Ellen MacArthur, the youngest sailor and first woman to circumnavigate the world alone. Britain raised Tower Bridge for her triumphant return after she completed the French Vendee Globe solo race, while the press hailed the 24-year-old as a conquering hero in the tradition of Charles Lindbergh and Sir Edmund Hillary.

And this was for coming in second.

Pity the poor Frenchman who won the toughest race in sailing last month. The victory of veteran racer Michel Desjoyeaux has been submerged in a sea of admiration for MacArthur’s finish in 94 days--11 days faster than the previous record and a day short of Desjoyeaux.

Although he came in ahead of MacArthur, it is her dogged pursuit of a dream that has captured the public’s heart at a time when Britain is suffering a winter of storms and devastating farm disease.

MacArthur was the sailor from landlocked Derbyshire. She was an underdog at just 5 feet 2 and many pounds lighter than her experienced competitors, all but one of them male. Fans followed on the Internet her progress across three oceans as she braved icebergs and frozen eyelids and defied 40-knot winds.

She made a detour to rescue another racer, maneuvered into the lead, and then crashed her yacht, the Kingfisher, into a sunken container as she neared the end of the race. By the time she steered the crippled boat across the finish line on Feb. 11, she was a symbol of mental and physical strength.

“People say, ‘Why did you do it?’ I did it because it was inside of me to do it,” MacArthur said in an interview.

MacArthur seems at once ordinary and extraordinary: She is a teacher’s daughter from a village called Whatstandwell who is close to her “gran,” and she has the courage to push herself to her limits and beyond.

Who could have known when she was a girl playing on the kitchen floor with a cardboard box and a roll of tape, or working with her father’s tools in the garage, that this was the formation of a sailor who would spend three months alone at sea?

Her aunt took her sailing for the first time when she was 8, and it was sea-love at first sight. She has described herself as a “geek” who devoured the sailing books she checked out of the library. She saved her school lunch money for three years to buy an 8-foot dinghy that she sailed on a pond half an hour’s walk from home.

At 18, she sailed single-handedly around Britain. She won the Young Sailor of the Year award and a smile of approval from the boating establishment, but only two replies to the 2,500 letters she sent out in search of sponsors.

Three years later, she completed the 2,700-mile Mini-Transat solo race from Brest, France, to Martinique in 33 days. With that, she won the backing of British retailer Kingfisher for the Route du Rhum transatlantic race in 1999, and the plum Vendee Globe.

The 24,000-mile, round-the-world race for solo sailors begins and ends at Les Sables-d’Olonne, on the west coast of France. Competitors sail south and then east, passing the Canary Islands, Heard Island, Antarctica and Cape Horn before heading back to France.

One of 24 solo skippers in the race, MacArthur set off from Les Sables-d’Olonne on a gray and wet afternoon in November with thousands of well-wishers chanting her name.

Her boat measured 60 feet long and would normally be crewed by 11 people. The cabin in which she spent so many months training and sailing was about 8 feet by 8 feet, filled with blinking computer screens, satellite telephones, gyro compasses and other vital instruments.

No, it’s never claustrophobic, she said. “It feels like home.”

By the fourth day of the race, she had already encountered savage seas and brutal winds on the cape of northwest Spain.

“Last night was the toughest I’ve spent on board. The wind went from 15 to 45 knots in 30 seconds,” she wrote in her e-mail diary, excerpts of which were published by the Observer newspaper. “The seas were just horrific, I couldn’t stop her leaping over each wave and crashing down on to the next. . . . Very tired.”

She had no idea then how much harder it would get.

MacArthur slept about five hours out of 24, but rarely for more than 20 minutes at a stretch, and on a continuum of time that had little to do with a clock.

“You never get up in the morning because you never sleep at night because the boat is going 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The nights are just like the days, but harder. It’s difficult when you have a problem if you can’t see it,” she said.

“I tend to work with the boat. If the boat needs attention, then I give her attention. I put her first, and I do find sometimes I’m absolutely exhausted,” she said.

MacArthur speaks of the Kingfisher as a partner. “She is a person,” the sailor said, a mystical statement made so matter-of-factly that it seems beyond question. “I didn’t feel I was alone because I was with Kingfisher. We have a really strong relationship.”

They passed the Canary Islands, and by Day 10 were on what MacArthur called a “sleigh ride” south.

“I spent at least four hours helming--it’s an amazing feeling, like being pushed over the top of a hill on a brakeless bike,” she wrote. She broke off that e-mail with a cheery “The kettle’s on. . . . The paella should be rehydrated by now.”

Two weeks into the trip, MacArthur was working her way through the windless Doldrums along Africa’s west coast with hands covered with heat and salt sores. On Day 16 she crossed the equator.

“I went for the rig check, which involves climbing the mast and checking over everything up there before we plunge into the southern ocean,” she wrote at the end of the third week. “It’s not easy alone as the boat never wants to sit still and there’s no one to winch you up, nor ease you down.”

A week later she awoke from a catnap in the cabin to find herself nose-to-nose with an iceberg. She bolted up to the deck.

“We passed within 15 to 20 meters of the berg, actually sailing through the white water next to it,” she wrote. “All I could think of was what would have happened if we had hit it.”

MacArthur cried herself to sleep on Day 38 for having misread her notes and waiting too long for the barometric pressure to drop before jibbing to change her direction downwind.

But there was worse to come that day.

The staysail, the small sail in front of the mast, broke loose. She lowered it and went to the foredeck to try to sort out the mess in a wind of 45 knots--about the speed of a car on a highway.

“It was then she started to go . . . and before I could make it back to the cockpit her deck was vertical. . . . I realized that I couldn’t get the mainsail down to fix a problem with one of the battens, which had broken,” she wrote.

The only option was to climb the rig.

“It was bitterly cold, the biting wind cutting into the bare skin on my hands and face,” she wrote. Every inch became more difficult as the boat surfed 30-foot waves.

She made it. But then getting down “took me closer to the edge than I wished to go. Each few inches I descended I had to take my weight with my hands, or legs.” She lost her footing and had “all my weight on my right wrist in one of the webbing loops on the sail. I hung there, banging into the mast, trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get my foot through the gap between the sail and the mast.”

It took more than an hour to descend the final 45 feet. She collapsed in the cockpit, seeing stars as if she were about to pass out.

“As I sit here now I feel worse than I have ever felt in my life. Physically I am totally exhausted, and mentally--not so far off,” she wrote.

The next day brought no respite. She found a rip along the foot of a small sail that was impossible to fix as it flapped in the wind.

She slowed her pace and sewed the sail, but the ups and downs continued. She was asked by race organizers to rescue a stricken competitor and lost a day heading his way before being told he was out of danger and she could resume her course. She moved into third place after 41 days and soon ran into violent squalls.

Inexplicable tears marked Day 54--New Year’s Day. Two days later, she encountered a succession of icebergs and frozen eyelids. More breakage and repairs preceded Cape Horn on Day 66.

“It’s fascinating what goes on in your mind when you’re out there,” she said. “You can’t describe it. You go beyond your limits and you know no one can help you come back. You’re just living through that. The lows make the highs higher, and the highs make the lows lower.”

After passing the equator again in the Atlantic on the way back, MacArthur and the Kingfisher suddenly pulled into the lead on Day 82--and gained 46 miles on Desjoyeaux. Euphoria.

This was due in large part to MacArthur’s keen ability to read the weather.

“Once they have digested all the data that appears on their computer screens, great sailors will study the clouds and make their decisions about what the wind will do,” sailing writer Bob Fisher explained in the Guardian newspaper. “Her knack at predicting accurately where the wind will be strongest and in the right direction is uncanny.”

But how quickly fortunes can turn at sea. Just two days later, disaster struck. The Kingfisher hit a submerged container, still 2,438 miles short of the finish line.

“All of a sudden there was the most almighty crunching sound and the boat felt like she had hit land. As I glanced behind to see what I had hit, I saw part of the rudder and the dagger board floating away. It was a gut-wrenching moment,” she wrote.

MacArthur checked the boat for water, fearing she had ripped a hole in the bottom. The hull was fine, but she would have to mend the dagger board, which keeps the boat steady, if she hoped to finish the race.

She fell back into second place as she made the repairs and then, on the final leg of the journey, suffered an even worse setback: The main forestay cable supporting the mast broke. She had to slow down or risk losing the mast.

“I now have to focus on finishing in the top three,” she wrote. “It’s been a difficult 10 days. I’m ready to finish.”

Finish she did, 20 hours behind the more experienced Desjoyeaux, who joined the crowd for her champagne-drenched arrival.

After three months alone at sea, MacArthur can hardly get five minutes to herself now. Prime Minister Tony Blair was among the first to congratulate her. She is a sought-after celebrity on radio and TV.

“To me, it’s the public that’s changed. I’m still Ellen. I am thrilled and touched and humbled by the response we’ve had,” she said. The “we,” of course, includes the Kingfisher.

MacArthur yawns with a fatigue that reveals the letdown after three months of adrenaline-charged competition and the wear of so many demands for the new hero’s time. She misses the boat.

“I knew a few weeks out that the hardest part for me was going to be stepping off of her, and I was absolutely right. It’s been the most incredible experience of my life. Despite all the problems, I was amazingly happy out there,” she said. “I’m sad it’s over.”

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About the Sailboat

Length: 60 feet

Beam: 17 feet

Draft: 16 feet

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Features

1. Escape hatch, life rafts

2. Galley

3. Bunks

4. Swing keel

5. Carbon mast and boom

6. watertight bulkheads

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

Ellen MacArthur’s manager, Mark Turner, Kingfisher Challenges, Isle of Wight, provided us with the following information: Ms. MacArthur is the youngest woman to race around the globe non-stop without assistance. She is also the second fastest person around the globe solo non-stop (by sea) at the age of 24. In addition, she is the youngest person (man or woman) to ever complete the Vendee Globe, the only non-stop round-the-world race.

Many readers contacted the L.A. Times Readers’ Representative to note that other women who had sailed around the globe at a younger age. However, what they were not taking into consideration was the fact that she was the youngest woman who raced around the globe. The others sailed around the globe, but at a cruise, not a race. The only other woman to have successfully raced around the globe was Catherine Chabaud and she did not do it non-stop without assistance.

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