Setting Sail for Greatness

Her favorite expression is à donf — “go for it” in French slang. This is what Ellen MacArthur’s many French admirers call out to her during races, and it’s also what the British yachtswoman, 28, has been doing all her life. But the phrase she seems to use most is English, and more stoic: “You just have to get on with it,” which she delivers with a shrug. That, evidently, is how one gets around the daunting problems faced at sea on the nonstop, transoceanic solo races that only a tiny élite of sailors feels able to tackle — races like the 2002 Route du Rhum from France to Guadeloupe, which she won in record time, or the 2001 non-stop, around-the-world Vendée Globe in which she came in second. Climbing an erratically swooping 27-m mast in 30-knot Antarctic winds to do repairs at the top? You just have to get on with it. Sailing through the equator in a pool of sweat and sunscreen, suffocating in your airtight living pod, your hands swollen with stinging salt sores and no shower in sight? Get on with it. “You don’t need showers to survive, do you, and there’s no one around to tell you that you smell.” Fall and break a limb sailing solo? Go on — that’s why you have splints and ready-to-mix plaster aboard. The only time, it seems, that you don’t have to get on with it is if you fall overboard. “Then you’re dead,” says MacArthur flatly.

The daughter of two teachers, MacArthur grew up in landlocked Derbyshire but became hooked on boats after her aunt took her sailing off England’s east coast at the age of 4. By 8 she had her own tiny dinghy launched on a local pond; at 18 she was sailing solo around Britain. About to leave school and always intending to go to university, she came down with mononucleosis. Illness gave her time to think about life and how it often gives no second chances. “I knew then I wanted to sail for a living,” she says.

Years of financial hardship followed. For three years, home was a 10-sq-m portable shed in a boatyard with a futon and kettle, from which she worked and tried to raise sponsorships. Two replies to 2,500 letters were hardly encouraging, but she pushed on. “You have to be determined, to will your way through,” she says. “At some stage, someone will believe in you and give you a go.” After racing solo across the Atlantic at 22, she found her white knight in Kingfisher plc, the British-based home-improvement retailer. Three years later she was sailing the 18-m Kingfisher in the toughest of all ocean challenges: the nonstop, single-handed, Vendée Globe circumnavigation. Finishing second in just over 94 days, the petite MacArthur became the fastest woman and the youngest Briton to sail alone around the world non-stop.

On a late summer’s day, MacArthur bounces expertly down the trampoline netting slung between the hulls of her state-of the-art, 29-m, $2 million trimaran, specially designed for her next project: attempting to break the solo nonstop round-the-world record.

She’s so lucky to be doing what she loves, she says, and she believes in spreading her luck. In the minuscule live-work area, she has a photo above her chart table of a little girl with a big smile, one of a group of children with cancer whom MacArthur takes on four-day sailing trips four times a year. “Those kids are struggling like hell, yet they’re still smiling about life,” she says. “It makes you think when things go wrong at sea … you then just get on with it.”