Tracy Edwards

Tracy Edwards had a comfortable childhood until her father died when she was ten. Her mother remarried a man who drank and was violent, and Tracy went off the rails, was expelled from school at 15 and drifted to Greece, where she got work as a stewardess on charter yachts. She discovered she loved being at sea. In 1985 she talked her way onto a boat in the Whitbread Round the World Race as the cook, the only role a woman was thought fit for.

She decided the next race would be different. Nobody would sponsor an all-female crew, and the yachting press was openly contemptuous, one journalist calling the boat a tin full of tarts. She remortgaged her house to buy a second-hand aluminium yacht, renamed it Maiden, and the crew refitted it themselves. The money finally came from King Hussein of Jordan, whom she had met while working on a yacht.

Maiden started the 1989 Whitbread with a crew of twelve women and a widespread expectation that they would not survive the Southern Ocean. They won two of the six legs and finished second in their class, the best result for a British boat in 17 years. She was the first woman named Yachtsman of the Year.

Decades later she found Maiden rotting in a harbour, restored her, and in 2024 an all-female crew sailed her to victory in the Ocean Globe Race.