Around the world with women at helm
“Winning is first. Surviving is secondary. You do find yourself taking risks,” says Tracy Edwards, neatly summarizing her adventure 30 years ago skippering a yacht in the Whitbread Round the World sailing race.
Three decades after that global tour, Edwards is on another, as the subject of Alex Holmes’ documentary, “Maiden.” Edwards and Holmes were speaking during the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where the frigid weather and drifts of snow serve as a reminder of how much Edwards loathes cold.
“You know you’re going to be cold, wet and miserable,” she says. “You’re counting down the miles and days. It’s very, very cold. It’s minus 30 degrees (in some places). There’s no door on the toilet, so when you’re sitting on
the head, you go very quickly. You become almost an automaton. Weather, icebergs, cold, food, eat, watch, sleep, get dressed, get undressed. Got to get there. Got to get there.”
Edwards does not come from a sailing family but started crewing on boats after running away from home to Greece when she was 16. She didn’t know how to swim. She gets seasick. She hates being cold and wet. Yet, she found her tribe and calling through sailing, enticed by the familial vibe among the crew and the excitement of hurtling, fullthrottle, over waves.
She was only 26 in 1989, the year she entered an allfemale crew and her boat, the Maiden, into the Whitbread (now the Volvo Ocean Race), a race held every three years since 1973. Her entry was controversial. It wasn’t Edwards’ youth or relative inexperience that inspired the naysayers, but the gender manning the boat. A woman, Margaret Thatcher, might be prime minister of Great Britain; that didn’t mean they should be sailing. Bob Fisher, described as the dean of sailing journalism, called Edwards and her crew “a tin full of tarts.”
The women had a lot to prove, as they recollect in the documentary with observations from Fisher and sailors who competed against them. “Maiden,” which opens Friday, July 5, depicts not only the race but also the discrimination the crew faced in entering a realm men declared as their own.
Edwards comes from a family that documented everything in photographs and home movies, and Maiden’s voyage was no different. She enlisted the boat’s cook, her lifelong friend Jo Gooding, to make a video record of the race. The footage had gotten scattered over the years, leading to months of detective work for Holmes to recover it. It was essential to the film he wanted to make.
“As a filmmaker, you want to put yourself in the mindset of the characters on the boat,” says Holmes, whose work includes “Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story” (2014). “They didn’t know how this was going to play out. I was trying to give the audience the experience of being on the journey with that crew and seeing it through their eyes.”
In fact, it was Gooding’s footage that convinced Holmes that “Maiden” needed to be a documentary. He first heard Edwards’ story when she gave a talk at his daughter Evie’s elementary school commencement. The story held him rapt; he immediately envisioned a film. But not a documentary, not if it was to capture the race’s thrilling moments. Then he discovered that Gooding had already done that.
“I knew Tracy would be a great character to base a film around,” says Holmes. “It was great material, but when I started to look at the footage, that’s when I saw what the potential would be. It was an incredible achievement and that comes across in the footage. It’s amazing that they kept filming through thick and thin.”
Holmes interviewed each crew member extensively, seeking their unvarnished recollections. One asked Edwards if she should be completely truthful or gloss over tensions that arose during the race. Edwards, who wrote her own account of the voyage in a 1990 book, “Maiden,” insisted she wanted a wartsandall portrait. Edwards herself submitted to two days of interviews.
“I’d thought I’d said everything there was to say about that, in interviews and the number of books I’ve written,” she says. “I can’t believe Alex found stuff — he had to wheedle it out of me — and there were difficult things to admit to.”
One memory that stands out vividly for Edwards is the iceberg field Maiden crossed in the final leg of the race. They had been through one field months before in the Southern Hemisphere. Now, in the north, they were passing through the area of the North Atlantic where the Titanic sank. Icebergs can’t be seen on radar, but looking at an ice floe chart, she thought, “We’re on the homestretch. Let’s go for it.”
“So I go up on deck — when you have fog, there’s usually no wind, when you’re sailing through fog, it’s quite weird, it’s damp and clammy and your voices echo even though you’re in the middle of the ocean, a really surreal sailing experience — and go, ‘So guys, we’re going to go through two really large iceberg fields. I’ve been looking at the statistics of hitting an iceberg, and I was thinking if we were looking for a little island, we wouldn’t find it. The statistics would be against us. So, I’m going to apply that to the whole iceberg theory, and I just want to go straight through and just hope that we don’t hit anything. What does everyone else think?’ They said, ‘That sounds like a really strong theory to us.’
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but the race takes over everything. I mean, as a skipper, I’m not going to put my crew’s life in danger, but sometimes that’s quite hard.”
“Maiden” opens at Bay Area theaters on Friday, July 5.
“It achievement comes was across an incredible and in the that footage. It’s amazing that they kept filming through thick and thin.” Alex Holmes, filmmaker