When Kirsten Neuschäfer decided to compete in the 2022-23 Golden Globe Race, she searched for a fast, safe and stable boat. She studied designs with a good ballast-to-weight ratio, and sought out a hull and rig that could withstand a hard beat to windward. 

She found Minnehaha in Newfoundland and knew that the tough, sturdy Cape George 36 was the one. The quick cutter with a generous sail plan met all of the official requirements—a production boat with a full keel, less than 36 feet long, designed before 1988—and a few requirements she had set for herself. 

“I wanted a super-secure boat for the Southern Ocean, which was fast as well,” Neuschäfer says. “Minnehaha suffers a little in light airs, but I knew I had a good chance of surviving. It was clear to me that the GGR was a bit of a race of attrition.”

Her instincts, along with detailed preparation, hard work and a bit of luck, served her well. Eight months after 16 skippers set out from the west coast of France to race solo 30,000 miles eastbound around a Southern Ocean course, Neuschäfer and Minnehaha caught one last whisper of wind off Les Sables d’Olonne, ghosted over the line, and sailed into history.

“I didn’t actually know that I’d won until the boats came out to meet me,” the South African sailor said of her historic finish. “I knew I was very close to Abhilash, so I was pushing hard. I knew we were very close.”

Indian skipper Abhilash Tomy battled the same light airs that Neuschäfer faced near the end of the race and arrived a day after, taking second place. Austrian Michael Guggenberger finished third, as the final skipper to complete the race in the racing class.

The Golden Globe Race is a nonstop, solo, unassisted round-the-world race with the start and finish line in Les Sables d’Olonne. Competitors are required to sail small boats using paper charts, VHF radio, sextants and celestial navigation. No modern weather-routing software is allowed, nor satellite communication, electronic instruments and autopilots. 

The route takes the sailors south through the Atlantic before heading east to Cape Town, South Africa, and around the Cape of Good Hope. After crossing the Indian Ocean and keeping Tasmania to port, sailors traverse the storm-plagued Southern Ocean and round Cape Horn. The ­final stretch leads north through the Atlantic and back to Les Sables d’Olonne.

Of the 16 skippers who started the 2022-23 race, 11 retired and two others made a single stop, moving them out of competition and into the Chichester Class. Neuschäfer’s victory made her one of only three people to win the race—and the first woman ever to win a solo circumnavigation yacht race.

“Minnehaha suffers in light airs, but I knew I had a good chance of surviving. The GGR is a race of attrition.”

The race is based on the 1968-69 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, won by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston aboard his 32-foot Bermudan ketch, Suhaili. Knox-Johnston was the only skipper to finish; in doing so, he became the first person to solo-circumnavigate the globe nonstop. Nine others retired, one was dismasted, and one committed suicide. The race was run once more in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the original race. Eighteen sailors set out, and five ­finished. French sailor Jean-Luc Van Den Heede won the 2018 edition. 

More people have gone into space than have sailed singlehanded around the world. The small nature of the club means that the sailors, while competing, still look out for one another’s health and safety.

During the first dash south down the Atlantic in the 2022-23 race, Neuschäfer relayed to the race committee the VHF-radio mayday call of fellow sailor Guy DeBoer, who’d hit rocks near the Canary Islands. After a night spent grinding over the rocks, DeBoer abandoned his boat the next morning with the help of a local rescue team.

Two months later, 450 miles southeast of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, Tapio Lehtinen’s Gaia 36, Asteria, flooded after taking on water from astern, and sank in less than 20 minutes. Lehtinen had just enough time to activate his EPIRB, put on his survival suit, and swim to his drifting life raft. “I gave Asteria a last standing salute as she went down,” the Finnish skipper said. Neuschäfer, the closet sailor to his position, altered course and hand-steered through the night to assist in his rescue. 

“The emergency handheld GPS showed Tapio’s coordinates,” Neuschäfer says. “I followed the track, but it was very difficult to spot a small, orange life raft. I was able to reach him on the VHF, but the early morning light was behind him, and I couldn’t see him. He fired off a flare, and I approached him on a beam reach. He’d been waiting 24 hours and was ready. He threw me a line, and I caught it on the first try, pulled him in, tied the life raft to Minnehaha, and helped him aboard.”

The two sailors shared a glass of rum. An hour later, Neuschäfer managed Lehtinen’s dangerous transfer from Minnehaha to bulk carrier Darya Gayatri, a freighter that had responded to the emergency call as well. “When I saw he was on board, I was just relieved for him,” she says.

Neuschäfer’s own heavy-weather plan focused on mitigating risks and staying true to strategies she’d set. When a low-pressure system approached on her way south to Cape Horn, she set a warp off her stern and held on for 12 hours until the storm blew over. In strong winds north of the Falklands, she hove-to, knowing that beating to windward in the extreme conditions risked damage to her boat. 

By this time in her life, she was no stranger to adventure. Neuschäfer’s early years had led her from South Africa to a set of jobs in Europe, followed by a solo trans-Africa biking trip, where she pedaled the continent north to south in her 20s. Her later experience working for Skip Novak on his Pelagic Expeditions exposed her to the wind and weather systems of the Antarctic Peninsula, Patagonia and the Falklands, and built her familiarity with the Southern Ocean.

“You need a great deal of self-sufficiency on these expeditions,” she says. “You need to know which tools and spares to bring. You need to be able to do all kinds of troubleshooting, refit the boats, change out a propeller, or fix a rig under difficult weather conditions.”

Neuschäfer had also done several long-distance ­deliveries, including taking a Leopard catamaran from the South Africa factory to Australia, and completing a singlehanded delivery from Portugal to South Africa on what she calls a labor-intensive boat. “This, that and the next thing needed to be done, and I discovered that I can solve problems out at sea,” she says.

As she followed the 2018 Golden Globe Race, she liked its spirit of adventure. “There are a lot of reasons to decide not to do something,” she says. “Having succeeded and followed my heart in other decisions, I knew that the GGR was something I should do.”

Her plans were nearly derailed early when she left her boat in Newfoundland and flew to South Africa, and then COVID-19 restrictions kept her from returning to Canada. She was eventually able to get back to Newfoundland and sail to Prince Edward Island, where she spent a year preparing for the race. She fell in love with the people there and made lifelong friends. Several were present at the Golden Globe Race finish line in Les Sables d’Olonne.

For her part, Neuschäfer makes light of the fact that the race dubbed a “Voyage for Madmen” was won by a woman. “I entered as a sailor,” she says. “I competed as a sailor and won as a sailor. On the same token, it’s a male-dominated race. If what I did inspires someone, then good will come of it, and I’m happy for that.”

Neuschäfer clearly has inspired the sailing world. On the final night of her race, as Minnehaha made its way up Les Sables d’Olonne channel, thousands of supporters lined the harbor walls, cheering and waving flares. Neuschäfer’s smile lit up the night. When she reached the dock, a friend handed her a bottle of champagne, which she sprayed into the air. Dressed in her sailing bibs and bare feet, she stepped off her boat and onto dry land for the first time in 235 days, and hugged her mother. 

Theresa Nicholson is CW’s senior editor.

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Today, every ocean has been sailed, every bay charted, and speed records are broken annually. So what is left for the sailor who quests to find true adventure? Well, go back in time of course! On July 1st 2018, 19 sailors will start a solo non-stop race around the world, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen for 50 years. The unique twist? Competitors are only allowed to use 1960s technology. Which means no GPS, radar, AIS, electronic charts, satellite phones, computers, electric auto-pilots, etc. If you want to take photos or videos, you better dig through the basement for some 35mm film and Super 8 film stock.

The race marks the 50th anniversary of the original Golden Globe Race (GGR), which has become something of a landmark in sailing history. In 1968, nine sailors set off to circle the globe without stopping; only one of them made it. Robin Knox-Johnston became a knight of the realm in the UK for his achievement. Another competitor, Bernard Moitessier, who could have won, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by continuing on for a near second lap of the world. Another competitor, Donald Crowhurst, sent out fake position reports while floating off the coast of Brazil and, upon threat of being found out, committed suicide.

The original race so captured people’s imaginations that when the 2nd GGR was announced in April 2015, organizers were bowled over with applications. Barry Pickthall, the race media coordinator, told me, “I thought we would be lucky to get more than 9 entries, the same as the original race.” The organizers optimistically set a limit of 25 entries, but in less than 2 weeks they had to open an additional five slots. “At one point we had 15 paid up entrants on a waiting list,” Pickthall told me, “And 150 more around the world who showed serious intent. In retrospect, we should not have worried about numbers.”

Pickthall thinks much of the appeal of retro racing has to do with the accessibility, “This is not a Volvo [which costs $15m to enter] or a Vendée Race [which costs $10m to put together a competitive entry]. We showed that you can enter this race and sail around the world for as little as $100,000, and there is a growing number of people with a solo circumnavigation on their bucket list who have accumulated that level of spare cash in their lives.”

It’s one thing to tinker with old boats and quite another to sail one around the world in a race that has a 1 in 9 finishing rate. Each competitor has their own motivations for signing up. Istvan Kopar, the only American-flagged racer, told me it comes down to a sense of self-sufficiency, “In the Vendée Globe their boats are like space shuttles, they have land support, minute-to-minute communication, all kinds of analysis. In this respect, the skipper is an operator as opposed to being a self-sufficient sailor.”

For Palestinian-American competitor Nabil Amra it was a matter of personal growth, “I’m preparing to start a new chapter in my life that has more to do with adventure. The GGR came along at just the right time to turn an incessant daydream into reality”

As a spectator, one of the greatest appeals of retro racing to me is its relatability. Most competitors have paid their own way, some even downsizing or selling off their homes to do so. The boat designs are those that you might see at your local marinas. To me, this makes the GGR 2018 truly an everyman’s race, democratizing sailing by pitting man and not technology against the elements.

Fiona McGlynn is an award-winning freelance writer, who recently cruised from Canada to Australia. This summer, she’ll be at the start line in France, reporting on the 2018 Golden Globe Race. Fiona also runs YoungandSalty.com a site dedicated to millennial sailing culture.

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The 2018 Golden Globe Race will start from Les Sables d’Olonne on Sunday July 1, 2018. The event marks the 50th anniversary of the Sunday Times Golden Globe solo non-stop round the world Race in 1968/9 when rules then allowed competitors to start from ports in northern France or UK between June 1st and October 31st. Nine started including Frenchmen Bernard Moitessier and Loïc Fourgeron. But there was only one finisher – Robin Knox-Johnston and his yacht Suhaili. Moitessier, sailing the larger and faster Joshua might have won (he rounded Cape Horn 17 days behind Suhaili) but instead of chasing Knox-Johnston back up the Atlantic, Moitessier turned east to start a second circumnavigation – “To save my soul” as he put it.

23 skippers at advance stages for the start – 6 others hopeful of finding a boat and sponsor in time.

With 6 months to go before the start, five French skippers continue to dominate the entry list. Two new skippers have announced their entry and the return of another who had previously retired, replace five entrants that have withdrawn from the Race.

The new faces are Ertan Beskardes, a Turkish born British national who has bought a Rustler 36, Commander Abhilash Tomy, KC (38) fromIndia who has built a Suhaili replica,and Tapio Lehtinen (59) from Finland who is campaigning a Sparkman & Stephens designedBenello Gaia 36. The entry list also shows a welcome return of Italian entrant Francesco Cappelletti with his Endurance 35.

Those to have withdrawn for personal or financial reasons are Izabel Pimentel from Brazil, British farmer Ian Reid, and two Frenchman, Lionel Regnier who is now assisting fellow Frenchman Jean-Luc van den Heede, andArsène Ledertheil, together with Swiss entrant Nérée Cornuz.

Australian boatbuilder Mike Smith simply ran out of time building his replica of Sir Robin Knox-Johnston’s 1968/9 winning yacht Suhaili and has now set his sights on entering the next GGR in 2022.

Don McIntyre, the Race Chairman says, “The closer to the start, the more the financial and personal pressures mount, and it was inevitable that some entrants would drop out. That leaves 23 strong entries all busy preparing their boats for the start in Les Sables d’Olonne on July 1st next year. It also leaves 7 places up for grabs and it so happens that we have that number talking to us about the possibilities of becoming late entrants in the Race. Given that there is just 6 months left, that will be a tall order for some who have to buy a boat and refit it, then complete their 2,000-mile proving voyage. Time will tell how many of these will make it to the start.”

Organisers and skippers held a meeting in Les Sables d’Olonne on December 6th with a focus on a workshop and press conference. The following day, the skippers visited the port facilities in Les Sables d’Olonne. Yannick MOREAU, the President of Les Sables d’Olonne Agglomeration said: “I am pleased to welcome 14 of the 23 Golden Globe Race skippers ahead of Salon Nautic for their first meeting her and to meet with the press. 12 out of 14 of the nationalities are represented here and is a demonstration of the international scope of the event. These 2 days spent on the coast mark the introduction to the Sables before the big start. This is the only opportunity to have almost all gathered at Les Sables d’Olonne before June 16 and the start on July 1st.”

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One of the all-time classic books of seafaring is Frenchman Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way, his first-person account of the epic 1968-69 Golden Globe Race, the first solo race around the world. Moitessier was in a battle for the lead with legendary British sailor Robin Knox-Johnston (who went on to win the event) and had put Cape Horn in his wake when he decided to retire from the race. He did so with a missive delivered to the deck of a passing freighter via slingshot with the message that he was quitting “because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul.” He continued on to Tahiti, sailing over 37,000 nautical miles before dropping his hook in French Polynesia. The Long Way is the tale of both a sailing adventure and a spiritual quest, and it inspired a whole generation of young French sailors to follow suit and race around the world, where so many of them flourished.

One of those acolytes is a friend of mine, another French sailor named Guy Bernardin.

I first met Guy while covering the 1982-83 BOC Challenge, another round-the-world race for singlehanded sailors. He was sailing a 38-foot boat — the fleet’s smallest — called Ratso II; the name was OSTAR spelled backward, in honor of the solo trans-Atlantic event of the same title, in which he’d also competed. With George Day, I wrote a book entitled Out There about that inaugural BOC race, which was special in many ways. Over the course of the grueling voyage, the competitors forged a bond that in many ways overshadowed the competition, which became a theme of the book. Everyone involved — including we journalists, from afar — felt privileged to have participated.

Now, to honor both Moitessier’s achievement on the 50th anniversary of his setting sail in the Golden Globe, as well as the spirit of that first BOC, Guy has launched another event called Longue Route 2018 (the French translation of Moitessier’s famous tome). The rules are simple: There really aren’t any. As the website (longueroute2018.com) states: “On this occasion, Guy invites other sailors to join him on this passage, in the same state of mind as Bernard Moitessier. This is not a race, there are no constraints, obligations or awards. It is a return to true values, individual and human responsibilities of the sailor and the man. Freedom and serenity to be alone at sea.”

There are a few guidelines. Entrants can sail anything up to 52 feet, and must set sail between June 18 and September 30, 2018. North American sailors have to leave from an East Coast port north of 41 N; European competitors can start anywhere north of 45 N on the other side of the pond. Everyone will finish in a French port yet to be determined. That’s it.

Guy is perhaps uniquely qualified to host such an event. After his success in the BOC, he found sponsorship and competed in the highest levels of professional sailing for many years. But eventually he grew tired of that and purchased a replica of Joshua Slocum’s Spray that he sailed twice around the world, once alone and once with his family. After his pro sailing career, ­following Slocum’s wake, on a replica of Slocum’s boat, was an altogether different experience that he still cherishes. Like Moitessier — who named his boat Joshua, after Joshua Slocum — Guy has a special place in his soul for the pre-eminent sailors who have gone before him. “I think we can learn a lot of things by being in touch with the past,” he told me recently. “I enjoy giving tribute to the people who did it before, like Slocum and Moitessier. There are others, but I think they are the most important. It gives you a better feeling and motivation if you go out to sea and remember the past and try to understand how they sailed at the time. I have learned so much from the sea. And it’s important to remember these people for the next generation, to keep their memory alive. It’s something we owe them.”

Guy has now circled the globe five times and rounded Cape Horn on a half-dozen occasions. It never gets old. “For me, Cape Horn is one of the seven wonders of the world,” he said. “As I passed it the first time I went around, it felt like there would be a new life for me. And everything did change after that. I was more confident about myself.”

There’s no question that, when it comes to sailing, Guy has taken the long view. He’ll be 74 the next time he rounds the Horn. So far, 10 sailors have signed up to join him. He wants more. “Everyone who finishes,” he said, “will be a winner.”

Herb McCormick is CW’s executive editor.

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