Ageless And Ambitious, A Solo Sailor Shoves Off Again

arnacles really slow you down,” said the woman in the magenta sweater as she switched off a cordless Dremel tool. She’d been stripping old bottom paint from the keel of her yacht, along with the remnants of those pesky crustaceans. If you’re not careful removing the last bit of them, she explained, they’ll be all too happy to return, ruining the hope for decent progress on a long journey.

Jeanne Socrates should know because long trips are just her thing. She has sailed around the world four times, give or take. Her last attempt ended in the wee hours of July 8, 2013, in Victoria, British Columbia, and earned her the distinction of being the oldest woman to circumnavigate the planet solo and nonstop (see the February 2014 issue of Soundings or search “Socrates” at SoundingsOnline.com). When she drifted across the finish line at Ogden Point, she was just shy of her 71st birthday. Now more than three years on, this retired math professor from West London, England, was fixing to go again.

Solo and nonstop again. East-about again. Starting and finishing in Victoria again. “What about, you know, age?” I asked Socrates over brunch at Canoe Cove Marina in North Saanich, British Columbia, where she was outfitting Nereida, her Najad 380, the boat she has owned since 2009.

“I still refuse to go down that road,” she replied. Age is nothing that should get your knickers in a twist. “I’m 74 — that’s a high number, but I don’t think about it.” More precisely, she thinks about age differently. And she knows how to adjust, such as grinding the sheets in a gale with the help of an electric winch.

Despite her protestations, age remains a backdrop to her endeavor, if for no other reason than that other pensioners draw inspiration from this widow and grandmother, who has been pushing the boundaries of what “active retirement” means. “I had many emails from people who brought it up,” she said. “Partly it’s about age. Partly it’s about women. Partly it’s about doing something you want to do. People seem to like the fact that I was 48 when I started dinghy sailing and windsurfing, and 52 when I first sailed on a yacht.” Jeanne Socrates will be the oldest person to sail around the world solo and nonstop if she completes her encore voyage. She was 70 when she finished her last circumnavigation.

No Rest for the Wicked

And there is something else: Success is like a drug. Look at the athletes who unretired at least once — Michael Phelps, Brett Favre, George Foreman, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong and so on. They didn’t come back for the money; they missed their craft, the crowds, the spotlight, the fame. I surmise that Socrates might have felt such pangs, as well.

I asked why the hell she’d want to do another 25,000-plus miles on the wild blue yonder, risking life and limb and failure, after she had been knocked down, shipwrecked and otherwise put through the wringer on her previous voyages. She said she has to do an encore because, well, she’s not all that good at leisure.

Sure there were those who baited her with “what if” and “if you ever,” but they were trying to beat down an open door. She had been sitting on the hard or tied to the dock for more than two years. She did make use of that time, learning Spanish with the help of an app to better convey her design ideas for a hard