Jessica Watson

Jessica Watson grew up on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland in a family that lived for years on a boat and later in a converted bus. She was dyslexic and found reading a struggle; her mother read her a book about a young sailor who circled the world, and the idea took hold when she was about eleven. She spent her early teens learning to sail, working through qualifications and finding sponsors who would take a schoolgirl seriously.

Weeks before departure, on a trial sail in September 2009, her yacht collided at night with a 63,000-tonne bulk carrier and lost its mast. Newspapers and radio hosts said her parents were reckless and that she would die. She said the collision had taught her something useful and set off from Sydney on 18 October 2009, aged sixteen, in Ella's Pink Lady.

She sailed east across the Pacific, around Cape Horn, through the South Atlantic and across the Indian Ocean. In the Southern Ocean the boat was knocked flat several times in storms, once rolling right over, with the mast in the water. She wrote a blog, ate a lot of freeze-dried food, and talked to her family on a satellite phone.

On 15 May 2010 she sailed back into Sydney Harbour after 210 days at sea, greeted by tens of thousands of people and the prime minister. She later skippered the youngest crew in the Sydney to Hobart race and wrote a book; a film of her voyage was released in 2023.