How Tracy Edwards and the Sailing Crew of Maiden Made Nautical History

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At the Loeb Boathouse, the boisterous all-female crew of Maiden reminisced about circumnavigating the globe with the help of the Whitbread and King Hussein of Jordan.

“I fell into it” is the way Tracy Edwards explains how she got into sailing. Raised in Pangbourne, England, Edwards was expelled from high school when she was sixteen, in the late seventies, and went backpacking around Europe. She wound up working at a bar in Greece, where a customer asked her, “Want to work on my yacht?” She became a stewardess on his charter boat, and during a stop in Martha’s Vineyard she met King Hussein of Jordan, who told her, “With faith, honor, and courage, anything is possible.” “I wrote it down on a piece of paper,” Edwards recalled recently, “and it went around the world with me on my nav station.”

How Edwards ended up sailing the globe is the stuff of seagoing legend. Soon after meeting King Hussein, she joined the crew of Atlantic Privateer and sailed the 1985-86 Whitbread Round the World Race. She was one of four women in the entire race, out of two hundred and thirty crew members, and was there only because she had enlisted as a cook. “I didn’t like that at all,” Edwards, who, at fifty-seven, has the quiet authority and silver pixie cut of Judi Dench, recalled. “At the end of the race, I just thought, I want to navigate. That’s the thing I enjoy doing. So, if the world doesn’t exist as I want it to exist, then I need to change it.”



Edwards spent the next three years assembling the Whitbread’s first all-female team. Funding was hard to come by, so she refinanced her house and bought a used fifty-eight-foot aluminum yacht called Prestige, which she renamed Maiden. Desperate for sponsors, she turned to her old acquaintance King Hussein, who offered the support of Royal Jordanian Airlines. Few people expected the team even to finish the race. With Edwards as skipper and navigator, Maiden set sail from Southampton, England, on September 2, 1989, and returned nine months and thirty-three thousand nautical miles later, having won two of the race’s six legs, including its most treacherous: from Uruguay to Australia, through the freezing waters of the Antarctic. When the yacht came into Fremantle, Edwards recalled, “the collective jaws around the world just dropped.”

Edwards and nine of her former crewmates were at the Loeb Boathouse, in Central Park. The women, who represent six nationalities, were crowded around a pair of bar tables with gin-and-tonics. In a few hours, they were due west, at the Landmark Cinema, for the première of “Maiden,” a documentary by Alex Holmes, which chronicles their journey. The next day, they were headed to Long Island, where Dawn Riley, who was one of Maiden’s watch captains (and its sole American), now runs a training fleet in Oyster Bay. “Sailing and barbecue and gin and all our friends together,” Angela Heath (a sail trimmer, from Ireland) said. “It doesn’t get better than that.”



The women—a boisterous bunch—reminisced about why they had answered Maiden’s call. Sarah Davies (English, first reserve) was in the army at the time, and saw an ad in Yachts & Yachting. “It just said, ‘Wanted: Girl Sailors.’ I said, ‘That’s me!’ ” Mikaela von Koskull (Finnish, helm) was a radio officer on a cargo ship. Passing Cape Horn, “I thought, Bloody hell, I’m going to do Whitbread one day.” They recalled the flagrant sexism they faced in the press, including the time a Guardian writer called them “a tinful of tarts.” Edwards said, “When we came first in New Zealand, he wrote, ‘They’re not just a tinful of tarts. They’re a tinful of smart, fast tarts.’ Which we loved, until someone pointed out the word ‘tart’ is still in there.”


They finished their drinks and walked to the Conservatory Water, the pond where kids steer model sailboats. A quick race? They picked out a pair of boats, and an employee brought them two remote controls, with levers for sails and rudders. The Maiden alumnae passed the remotes, hooting as they navigated around a triangle of basketball-size buoys. “I’ve stalled,” Davies said, twiddling her joystick. “Disaster!”

“You never get wind when you want it,” Edwards observed, fanning herself in the eighty-degree heat. “That’s rule No. 1 with sailing.”

“This is what the doldrums were like,” Heath said, referring to the windless waters around the equator. Another crew member added, “There, we took our clothes off. We can’t do that here.”



Edwards checked her watch. “O.K., I think we need to go. I’m making an executive decision. I’m now skipper again.” They headed back to their hotel to change, abandoning the race halfway, as their critics had expected them to do thirty years ago. In 2014, Edwards launched a crowdfunding campaign to buy back Maiden, which a subsequent owner had left to rot in the Seychelles. Princess Haya, King Hussein’s daughter, paid for the boat to be transported back to England and restored. Maiden is now on a three-year worldwide charity tour, with all-female crews. “She’s halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii,” Edwards said. “She’ll be in New York July next year.”



By Michael Schulman