Ellen MacArthur may be only 26 - but she already holds the record for a woman sailing solo around the world. So where does she go from here, asks Lorna Siggins
Ellen MacArthur wouldn't even have been the proverbial twinkle in her mother's eye when British yachtsman Donald Crowhurst set out to sail around the world. The year was 1968, and the event was a non-stop, single-handed race.
Some six months after departure, Crowhurst appeared to be on the home leg and stood to win the contest. On July 10th, 1969, the Royal Mail vessel, Picardy, was en route from London to the Caribbean when it came across Crowhurst's trimaran. The deck was deserted; the skipper was nowhere to be found. Only a mizzen sail was up, but nothing on board pointed to an accident. In the cabin lay several logbooks, which contained clues to a fictitious voyage. It emerged that Crowhurst had never left the Atlantic, in spite of press reports to the contrary.
Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, authors of the subsequent investigation into the mystery, have described it as "one of the most extraordinary stories of human aspiration and human failing" they had had to record. In their book, The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, Tomalin and Hall delved deep into the mind of the single-handed sailor, and drew on a chilling quote from Joseph Conrad's Nostromo: "The young apostle . . . had died striving for his idea by an ever-lamented accident. But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand . . ."
"Solitude", "loneliness" and "fear" are not words that appear in the index to Taking on the World, Ellen MacArthur's recently-published autobiography. Now aged 26, MacArthur is best known as the youngest person to complete the world's toughest single-handed, non-stop yacht race, the Vendee Globe - and the fastest woman (and fastest Briton) to circumnavigate the world by sea.
Her 387-page account - severely edited after her first draft was far too long - reflects the mind of a highly ambitious, focused individual; one who, on the surface, appears to be completely obsessed by her profession, and who is almost devoid of the imagination to feel raw and unadulterated terror. Yet, read on and there is a creative, nervous, fearful and very human side to this young woman who began sailing from the age of four with her auntie, Thea, in a 26-foot boat.
The Crowhurst book was part of her early library - a library that was dominated by accounts of single-handed adventures. Though she sailed around Britain by herself when still in her teens, had completed several single-handed transatlantic races by her early 20s, and distinguished herself in the single-handed, non-stop, round-the-world yacht race from France, the Vendee Globe, she has much sympathy for Crowhurst's situation.
"It was a very different time, when there wasn't the sort of communication we have at sea now. In the Mini-Transat (single-handed trans-Atlantic race), which I did in 1997, we were very restricted in terms of when we could communicate. So I have some idea of that degree of isolation."
She chuckles at the suggestion that she might never have had a fright.
"Plenty," she acknowledges, but none that have ever shaken her to the extent that she couldn't carry on.
Her first storm, when she was barely eight years old, was during a sail back across the North Sea with her auntie, Thea, and family. Though the boat was thrown around, she remembered how solid it felt and how much faith she had in it, and in her fellow crew.
Fast forward to one of many daunting situations she has experienced - this one on the approach to the Equator, during the 2000-2001 Vendee Globe. She had climbed 90 feet up the mast of her 60-foot yacht, Kingfisher, to change a wind vane when she noticed a squall on the horizon. The wind rose, the rain lashed, and she had to continue her job with the boat heeled over.
"That was ok," she says,"but then the wind just died as often happens in one of those squalls. The boat gybed seven times while I was still up there and there was absolutely nothing I could do." Each time there was a violent gybe (where the boat changes direction so that the stern passes through the wind), her legs were trapped. "I had absolutely no control over the situation, so all I could do was to concentrate on the job, finish it and hope the wind would come back on the right side of the sail - or I would be in the water". When she eventually got back on deck, she was black, blue and shaking from head to toe.
Much has been made of MacArthur's inland roots in "landlocked Derbyshire", but boats and boating were a part of her life from a very early stage. What's more, her parents, her aunt and grandparents were never anything but encouraging, and she had a grandmother who was to graduate with a European languages degree at the age of 83.
MacArthur says she was fascinated by spy and survival books from an early age, fancied herself as a commando, and devoured Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons as soon as she could read. She saved her school dinner money for eight years to buy her first craft, an eight-foot dinghy named. Threep'ny Bit.
Her 10th birthday present was a week at a race training camp at Rutland Water. She describes how she felt an outsider then, not having a dinghy with new sails or the latest gear. She had no wetsuit, and sailed in a navy blue anorak and tracksuit which she would try to dry each night over a dormitory radiator. It was the first time in her life that she felt lonely; though she was surrounded by people, she might as well have been a "million miles away".
There were echoes of this lost little girl some years later when she first moved to the mecca of professional long-distance yachting in Britain - Hamble on the river which flows out to the Solent. At this stage, she was set on sailing as a career, and had already completed her solo round-Britain voyage; a bout of glandular fever while still at school had thwarted her ambitions to become a vet, but had also made her realise what she really wanted to do.
However, she felt very out of place during those first few weeks in her "scruffy" 21-footer, next to pristine sailing yachts crewed by weekend sailors driving fast, expensive cars.
For someone who was to spend so much of her short life alone with the elements, some of her loneliest moments appear to have been when she was in company. And perhaps that has been part of the attraction, for a solo voyage may be unrelenting and tough, but it has none of the politics associated with sailing with a crew.
Preparation is crucial. "You can work to reduce the risks," she explains. "For instance, before the Vendee Globe we capsized my boat, Kingfisher, with me inside her and I had to right her - as a practice for a knock-down that I might have en route."
Hardship and deprivation is something she has never had to "train" for; the life of a professional, long-distance sailor is not an easy one, and finding sponsorship is a constant challenge. In Hamble, she lived in a Portakabin with no running water; on a boat-purchasing trip to St Malo in France, she had no money for a hotel and slept in an old spinnaker on the cabin floor, as she has done many times since.
When she describes how her crew ran out of gas early on during a race from Quebec to St Malo (though she had a hot cup of coffee when one of the intrepid crew tried making a "stove" of olive oil!), one realises that this was no great shock to her system. Similarly, when she didn't climb into a sleeping bag once for the four weeks she was on the Mini-Transat. "If there is one thing you are sure of when you start a race it is that you will finish it completely exhausted," she says.
She has kept copious logs, recorded tapes and videos of her solo voyages, for she has harboured a long-time ambition to write. She enjoys painting, and earned her keep by selling pictures in marinas; she also did the sketches for the book. In between publicity dates, she isnow preparing for another attempt at the Route du Rhum single-handed transatlantic race, and later this year she sets off with a crew of 12 to 14 to try to break the world record for a global circumnavigation, which currently stands at 64 days.
So what does she do by way of spoiling herself?
"The real luxury for a single-handed sailor is to get into bed for a full eight hours and sleep. But it doesn't happen for a good week after a race. And when it does, it is absolute heaven."
Taking on the World by Ellen MacArthur is published by Michael Joseph/Penguin at £17.99 sterling