Solo round the world in 130 days (and 176 instagram reels)
Fifteen years ago I became hooked on solo ocean racing in large part thanks to a website called Blogstar, which was set up by Marco Nannini to aggregate in real-time the blog posts of the 31 skippers (including himself) who competed in the 2009 Original Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race. I went to the start in Plymouth to wave off my friend Oscar Mead, whose refit I had witnessed from our project boat next to his in a shed in Cowes the previous winter.
I then eagerly consumed every post by Oscar and the other 30 competitors, many of whom would become friends and mentors on my own OSTAR journey. In particular, I was inspired by the beautifully written accounts of Pip Hildesley (née Hare) who, despite fracturing a rib and stopping in Ireland to repair damage to her standing rigging, managed a respectable mid-fleet finish before going on, as we all know, to ever greater ocean racing achievements.
Today the rules of most major French short-handed races require skippers to provide a certain number of audio and video updates from the racecourse. But with few exceptions, these hundreds of videos fail to move me, or very few others, if the viewing stats are to be believed.
And so it was very exciting, not just for diehard solo racing fans like myself, but also her nearly 500,000 Instagram followers, many of whom know nothing about sailing, to follow 29-year-old Cole Brauer as she recently sailed her 2007 Owen Clarke designed Class 40 First Light to second place in the Global Solo Challenge, a solo non-stop pursuit race around the world organised by none other than Marco Nannini.
With her arrival in A Coruña, Spain, on 7 March, she became the first American woman to have completed a non-stop solo circumnavigation and took 8 days off the Class 40 record. More importantly, with the help of a Starlink satellite broadband setup, and the near-continuous social media activity it enabled, she’s brought sailing to the attention of a huge new audience, enthralled by her candid daily video reports.
She now has her sights set on a 2028 Vendée Globe campaign and is well placed to land a decent sponsor, and consequently a good boat and great coach.
■ www.instagram.com/p/ C2kE8I4r0hz