Sailing Alone Around the World Is Like Raising a Newborn
Across more than four months at sea, Cole Brauer lived on freeze-dried food and spent her days keeping her 40-foot boat from falling apart.
Marketplace · Surprise, you've got medical bills!Cole Brauer wakes up alone at sea and goes straight to work.
She prepares a meal from freeze-dried astronaut food, which she ate, in her words, "for four months and one week." Then she checks the boat. She says waking means immediately starting her routine.
Brauer made history as an American woman who finished a solo voyage around the world without stopping. She describes that months long job as caring for a newborn.
"You are taking care of the boat. The boat is your child," Brauer says. "You make sure that the boat's not trying to sink on you, that she's not crying too much, and you're fixing everything that has broken the night before."
The child in this case was First Light, a 40-foot racing sailboat built for speed that can reach about 20 knots, or roughly 23 miles per hour on land. Brauer sailed it in the Global Solo Challenge, a nonstop solo race, for a trip around the world that took her more than four months. She has since moved to faster boats that race closer to 40 knots.
She had not been expected to get there at all. People had told her no over and over, she says, because she was too small, because she was a woman, and because she did not come from the correct family or have the correct last name. So she decided that if no one would let her sail on their boat, she would race around the world alone, and she found private sponsors willing to fund the dream.
Those sponsors treated her like a company, she says, calling themselves investors and letting her hire the team she wanted. She chose hungry newcomers who wanted an opportunity, and she says they worked harder than if she had hired the most seasoned experts. That freedom also let her be creative with social media.
Her days were a routine of eating, checking and fixing the boat. She says the food isn't the most appetizing and that four months sometimes felt like nine.
Solo sailing, in her account, is largely caring for the boat.
Questions people ask
How do solo sailors sleep without hitting something?
In short naps, usually 20 to 30 minutes at a time. Solo sailors set multiple loud alarms and use radar and automatic identification system alarms that warn if another ship or obstacle is near, then wake, scan the horizon and sails, and sleep again.
What is astronaut freeze-dried food actually like?
Freeze-dried meals are cooked food with almost all the water removed, so they are light, compact, and last for months without refrigeration. Add hot water, made with a small stove or water heater aboard, and the meal softens back into something like stew, pasta, or scrambled eggs.
What was the Global Solo Challenge she raced in?
It was a solo, nonstop race around the world for smaller boats, starting and finishing in Spain and going eastward around the three great southern capes. Sailors could not stop for repairs or supplies, and Brauer became the first American woman to complete a solo, nonstop trip around the world.