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Outside Magazine November 2001

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She Rules the Waves
For intrepid sailor Ellen MacArthur, round-the-world records are meant to be shattered
By Tim Zimmermann


	High-wire act: A video camera attached to the mast captured this image of MacArthur dangling above Kingfisher and the Southern Ocean during the 2000-2001 Vendé Globe.

LAST FEBRUARY, A cheerful 25-year-old Brit named Ellen MacArthur sailed into incandescence aboard her Open 60 Kingfisher with an improbable second-place finish in the Vendée Globe, a 26,000 mile, nonstop, solo circumnavigation that is justifiably considered the world's toughest yacht race. Why improbable? Because it was MacArthur's first Vendée bid, and she had been racing solo for just four years. But mostly because MacArthur, who stands five-foot-two and weighs 130 pounds, is the youngest person ever to have attempted the race, much less finished it. Her time of 94 days, four hours was the second-fastest solo circuit in history, and the fastest ever by a woman. Even race-winner Michel Desjoyeaux, a 35-year-old French sailing star who found himself dueling with MacArthur for the lead two weeks from the finish, was stunned by her performance. "She's a mystery to me," Desjoyeaux said on the dock after the race. "I don't know what I have been doing for the past ten years."

It's a long way from a landlocked home in the hills of Derbyshire to the Vendée Globe. MacArthur got hooked on the life afloat at age four, sailing off England's east coast with her aunt during summer vacations. By 22, she had knocked off two major transatlantic races, the 1997 Mini-Transat and the 1998 Route du Rhum, and was launching her campaign to sail around the world, mastering everything from diesel mechanics to weather forecasting to one-on-one racing tactics. More than anything else, the Vendée is a merciless test of character, and MacArthur unveiled an indomitable spirit. She laboriously hand-sewed a shredded spinnaker, made four exhausting climbs up her 79-foot mast to repair broken gear, destroyed one of her two daggerboards on a submerged object, and within days of the finish was in danger of losing her mast.

The grit and soul of MacArthur's Vendée effort boosted her into the sailing stratosphere. Her Web site survived nearly 500 million hits over the course of the race. Hyperbolic sailing commentators hailed her as the greatest sailor England has ever produced. Slavering European advertisers begged--in vain--for her endorsement of everything from hair spray to vacuum cleaners. (Durex, a condom company, hoped to get her to pose in a rubber dinghy.) Even the queen took note, dubbing MacArthur a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

MacArthur is now invading the elite multihull racing world. On November 4, she and 1993 Vendée Globe winner Alain Gautier will double-hand a 60-foot trimaran from France to Brazil in the high-speed Transat Jacques Vabre. For next year MacArthur is considering another solo lap of the planet, in the 2002 Around Alone race (which, unlike the Vendée, has stops). Outside managed to catch the peripatetic sailing prodigy shortly after she and four mates had steered Kingfisher to a win in the Portsmouth-Baltimore leg of the EDS Atlantic Challenge. MacArthur was rushing to catch a plane back to Europe to go, you guessed it, sailing.

Outside: What makes you a good sailor?
MacArthur: You've got to have common sense. And you've got to be able to cope with things going wrong. It's not going to be a drama. If the batten breaks, you have to go and fix it. So many people get so strung-up about things.

O: When you were in your teens you were thinking about going into veterinary medicine but dropped it to sail. Why the radical career change?
MacArthur: I got glandular fever, and I was flat for a month. During that time the [1993-1994] Whitbread Round the World Race was on TV. All of a sudden I just decided, That's it, I'm not going to go to university, I'm going to sail. Life is too short to go off and do something you are not 100 percent sure you want to do.

O: Was your ambition always to go into the top levels of racing?
MacArthur: I just wanted to be on the water. I knew that one day I wanted to sail around the world. I had saved all my dinner money for years and years at school for a boat, and I managed to buy a little 21-footer named Iduna when I was 17. She was absolutely knackered. Everything was broken. I refitted her during five months and then sailed her single-handed around Britain.

O: Why were you so drawn to single-handed racing?
MacArthur: When I bought Iduna I automatically took out one of the berths. I don't know why I did that. I didn't mentally think, I'm never going to sail this boat with someone else. I took out that berth because I needed more space.

O: There aren't a lot of top single-handers with XX chromosomes. How have the other sailors received you?
MacArthur: The Italians nicknamed me Piccola Roccia, their "Little Rock." So many people say, "How's it feel to be a young girl in this sport?" and "How's it feel to be the only girl in the race?" I never considered myself any different from them. Never. It wasn't an issue. I'm just Ellen doing what I would be doing if I were Robert.

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