The Famous Project crew complete first all-female non-stop circumnavigation
They crossed the line battered, bruised and sailing under a makeshift rig. But none of that mattered.
After 57 days and 22 hours at sea, the eight women aboard the maxi trimaran IDEC SPORT became the first all-female crew to complete a nonstop circumnavigation of the globe on a multihull, crossing between Ushant and Cape Lizard around Monday lunchtime.
It was a voyage defined as much by what went wrong as what went right. A mainsail torn from luff to leech. A starboard daggerboard that gave up somewhere in the South Atlantic. Both autopilots dead. And then, as if the Southern Ocean hadn't been enough, Storm Ingrid threw 45-knot winds and punishing seas at them in the Bay of Biscay.
“If it were easy, everyone would do it,” Britain's Dee Caffari said when the mainsail first ripped. By the end, the crew were nursing their 32-metre trimaran home on little more than a headsail and the 30-square-metre wing mast.
Alexia Barrier, the French skipper who conceived and led the project, assembled an international crew with serious credentials. Caffari was completing her seventh lap of the planet. Spain's Támara Echegoyen is an Olympic gold medallist. Dutch sailor Annemieke Bes, Swiss-Kiwi Rebecca Gmür Hornell, Americans Deborah Blair and Stacey Jackson, and Italian-American Molly LaPointe rounded out a squad built on deep offshore experience.
The Famous Project launched with the Jules Verne record in its sights. A string of gear failures soon narrowed the mission to simply getting home.
“It’s such a shame they didn’t have the budget to turn back at the first gear failure, repair and start again as other projects have done,” said Tracy Edwards, the offshore legend who skippered the first all-female crew in the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race. “This meant that for most of the way round, sadly, they had no hope of breaking the Jules Verne record.”
Edwards continued: “Bearing in mind that Alexia and Dee have already successfully sailed non-stop around the world and one of the crew, Molly Lapointe, was on Maiden when they became the first all-female crew to win an around the world race; this circumnavigation was a great training exercise, gave more women the opportunity to circumnavigate and I sincerely hope they find the budget to mount a serious attempt at the overall record in the future.”
Thomas Coville's Sodebo claimed the new outright record a day earlier, completing their circumnavigation in 40 days and 10 hours. But the Famous Project crew have etched their own line in the history books, setting a benchmark for all-female crews. The overall record? That's unfinished business.
