Tracy Edwards MBE changed the course of sailing history with her all-female Whitbread race crew - a story of determination that was immortalised in the 2018 documentary film Maiden. Now she’s using her famous yacht to alter the destinies of girls across the world...
Checking her email one summer’s day in 2014, pioneering yachtswoman-turned-philanthropist Tracy Edwards saw a message from a sender she didn’t recognise. Out of curiosity she opened it, and in doing so altered the course not only of her own life, but potentially the lives of millions of girls the world over.
The email came from a marina in Mahé, an island in the Seychelles. Over a glass of rosé at the Royal Ocean Racing Club in London, Edwards shares the message with me: “It said, ‘Did you know your beautiful boat is sitting here rotting? If someone doesn’t come and do something about her, we’re going to take her out and sink her.’ It was heartbreaking.”
The boat was Maiden, a 17.7-metre aluminium ocean racing yacht designed by Bruce Farr in 1979. Edwards had bought it second hand to contest the 1989-90 Whitbread Round the World Race (later the Volvo; now the Ocean Race). At 26, she skippered the first all-female crew to take on the challenge and, against the expectations of sceptics, won two of the race’s six legs, including the perilous Uruguay-to-Fremantle leg across the Southern Ocean. At the end of the race, after 167 days and 33,000 nautical miles Maiden finished second in class overall.
By the time that email came through in 2014, the boat wasn’t hers anymore; she’d sold it in 1990. And the marina was demanding €75,000 (£63,000). “It wasn’t what she was worth,” Edwards explains, “it was what they were owed. Her owner had skipped and just left her. She was in such a bad state, she wasn’t even worth scrap.”
Edwards didn’t have the money to spare. But – as someone for whom there is no such word as can’t – she was unfazed. She contacted Maiden’s original crew members, and between them they raised the money through crowdfunding. Two months later she was on a flight to Mahé, expecting to sail Maiden home. “I thought, ‘She can’t be that bad,’” she says. “But she was. We’d have died if we’d sailed her a mile.”
This time Edwards was in a quandary. But, as has happened more than once in her extraordinary life, the planets were aligning in her favour. She was booked to speak at a conference of the Association of Independent Travel Operators at a Dead Sea resort in Jordan – motivational speaking is one of many strings to her bow – an event that garnered much more press attention than one might have expected because of the story of the decaying boat. Word reached Princess Haya Bint al-Hussein, daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan, Maiden’s original sponsor, who called her. “She said: ‘My brother sent me a press release saying you’ve rescued Maiden. What can I do to help?’”
The story of how Tracy Edwards, now 57, became a competitive sailor is the subject of two books and the recent feature film, Maiden, a documentary that grossed $3.5 million (£2.7m) in the US in the first three months of its release. But it’s a tale worth retelling nonetheless.
As a child, Edwards had dreamed of becoming a ballerina like her mother, who had danced with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, attending the performing arts school ArtsEd.
But although she retains the bearing and physique of a dancer – slight and slender, yet forged, one suspects, from steel and springs – Edwards quit at 12, when her widowed mother remarried. The family moved to Wales, and a volatile relationship with her stepfather turned her into a rebel. She was suspended from school 26 times and eventually expelled. Encouraged to travel by her mother, she went to Greece, where, still a teenager, she was working in a bar in Piraeus when the skipper of a motor yacht asked her if she would consider filling in as stewardess on charters. She didn’t hesitate. “I left that night and was on the boat the next day.”
Until then she’d had, she says, “zero” experience with boats, bar a short trip with her father from Hayling Island, on the south coast of England, to the nearby Isle of Wight when she was eight. She was seasick, and “vowed never to set foot on [a boat] again”. But this was a job, and she had a living to earn. And in any case, the yacht in question – Kovalam (now Lady May of Glandore) – was an alluring prospect: a 31.5-metre motor yacht designed in 1929 by Philip & Son that had been used in the 1982 film of Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun.
“She was beautiful,” recalls Edwards, who despite occasional seasickness soon found she loved the life aquatic. Autumn approached. “We ended up in Palma, and someone asked if I was doing the season in the Caribbean. So, I did my first transatlantic, this time on a sailing boat, and learned how to sail. On my second transatlantic I learned how to navigate.”
Over time – she reckons she covered about 250,000 nautical miles working on charter boats – she made the transition from stewardess to deckhand to first mate, thanks to a succession of “extraordinary” skippers. “They were such mentors. Every single one saw something in me and took time to change my life.”
The luckiest of her breaks came in 1985 off the coast of Massachusetts in Martha’s Vineyard, on a 31.6-metre ketch called Excalibur that was hired for a day charter by King Hussein of Jordan and his wife, Queen Noor. Edwards served them lunch, and the king engaged her in conversation, continuing to chat to her as she washed up afterwards.
“We shared the same interests,” she says. “He was a pilot, and I’d learned to navigate, and we both loved navigation. I love radios; he was a ham radio operator. And we both loved taking machinery apart. He asked me what I was going to do next, and I said what I really wanted was to do the 1985-86 Whitbread Round the World Race and that I’d tried [to sign on] a boat, but they didn’t want a girl. And he said: ‘You don’t strike me as someone who takes no for an answer. If you want to do this, you have to fight for it. You have to go back and get on that boat.’ And I realised then that was what I had to do.”
This time she was taken on as a cook. The 24-metre yacht, which like Maiden had been designed by Farr, was called Atlantic Privateer. Its skipper warned her at her interview that, in his opinion, “Girls [were] for shagging when we get into port.” But Edwards knew she could take care of herself, even though she was the only woman on the 18-strong crew (there were only four female crew, out of 230, in the entire race). Atlantic Privateer didn’t finish. But the experience galvanised her determination to try again – as skipper of her own all-female crew.
She placed an ad in Yachts & Yachting that read: “Wanted: girl sailors,” recruiting 11 women, all of whom were more experienced than she was. King Hussein, who had kept in touch, told her: “Leadership is not about being the best, it’s about bringing out the best in others.”
Edwards recalls: “He said, ‘You have to believe in people, trust people. If you truly love human beings and understand them, that’s the way to lead. With faith, honour and courage, anything is possible.’ That was his motto. I wrote it on a piece of paper and stuck it above my desk, and it went around the world with me stuck above the nav station.”
She needed a boat. A new one was beyond her, financially, but eventually she found Maiden, then called Prestige, and mortgaged her home to pay for it. Thanks to King Hussein, Royal Jordanian Airlines became the major sponsor. Three decades on and now newly restored, Maiden’s livery retains its grey and white as a gesture of gratitude to her mentor, who died in 1999. Which brings the story to King Hussein’s fourth daughter, Princess Haya’s, offer to help.
“You’ve rescued Dad’s boat,” she’d told Edwards when she heard about Maiden in Mahé, and asked how she could help. “So I said: ‘We need a lot of money to restore her.’ And she replied: ‘Well, I can take care of that. But what are you going to do with her?’.”
At that stage Edwards wasn’t certain. “I knew I wanted to do something meaningful with her. She’d changed my life, and I thought maybe she could change others’ too.” Princess Haya flew to London; the two met, and within two hours they came up with a plan. They would use Maiden to raise funds for a grant-making charity, the Maiden Factor Foundation, to support initiatives that help educate girls around the world.
Edwards, having become an ambassador for the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children soon after her 1990 Whitbread achievement, has a history of supporting good causes. A patron of six projects, it made sense to start with those. It isn’t only culture and poverty that prevents girls from going to school, she explains, it can be something as simple as a lack of segregated toilets that deters them, hence the work of Fields of Life, a development organisation in East Africa, and now a beneficiary of the Maiden Factor Foundation. And Just a Drop builds wells in developing countries so that women and girls can spend time studying instead of spending hours fetching water for their villages.
Then there’s the literacy charity Room to Read, specifically working with girls in refugee camps in the Middle East, and Positive Negatives, which produces literary comics, animations and podcasts about contemporary social and humanitarian issues aimed at young girls. Last, but not least, the Girls’ Network mentors young women at risk of leaving school before their exams.
“We have a big problem in the West with girls dropping out at 15,” Edwards says, “and missing those really important years, which is something I’m very aware of.” She herself gave up on school at 15, but eventually earned a degree in psychology. “That really decreases their life choices. The Girls’ Network puts women who’ve achieved something in business, or in life, into schools to work with groups of girls, and it’s phenomenally successful in motivating them.”
Just as Maiden is proving to be. Towards the end of 2018, the yacht was ready to go to sea again, setting sail on what will be a three-year, round-the-world voyage, crewed entirely by women, aiming to raise both funds and awareness. She headed first for Malta, then Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand, where Steinlager 2, her great rival and overall winner of the 1989-90 Whitbread Race greeted her.
From there she sailed across the Pacific to Hawaii and then to Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles – “All wealthy yachting centres where we know we can raise lots of money,” Edwards notes. The day we meet, the boat has just left San Diego and is heading, via the Panama Canal, for Antigua in the Caribbean. There had been a plan to go south along the Pacific Coast, but Hurricane Kika held the crew in port in Los Angeles for 10 days. "Thanks to climate change, hurricane season is so unpredictable now,” Edwards says.
The yacht has a practical role to play, too. “We have hundreds of schoolgirls come aboard,” Edwards says, “which is much scarier than the Southern Ocean, I can tell you. And we’ve got this amazing female crew who also give talks in schools. We can’t keep up with the number of schools that want us. Teachers love it.”
Because, she stresses, it’s not just about telling girls there’s nothing they can’t do. It’s equally about showing them. And Maiden is proof of where single-minded determination can get you. “She’s not an idea or a motto,” says Edwards, or a glib instruction to follow your dreams. “She’s an absolute, actual physical thing.”
And so she is: a gloriously restored and refitted manifestation of just what a young woman can achieve – and go on achieving – if she really puts her mind to it. themaidenfactor.org
First published in BOAT International's Life Under Sail in April 2020. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.