Sixty-four years ago today, Tracy Edwards was born. Twenty-seven years later she was on the start line of the Whitbread Round the World Race with the first all-female crew ever to enter it.
I always want the manifest, and hers is my favourite kind: one second-hand 58-foot aluminium hull, bought against a mortgage on her own house, and a crew who then took the thing apart and put it back together themselves. Not a shipyard with a contract — them, with grinders and wire brushes and a great deal of winter. That is the part logisticians recognise instantly. Anyone can buy a boat. Rebuilding one you cannot afford, in the months you do not have, is the actual expedition, and it happens before anybody sees water.
Then two leg wins in the Southern Ocean, which is not a place that hands out consolation prizes. Edwards went on to be the first woman awarded the Yachtsman of the Year Trophy, and an MBE, and she wrote two books about it. In the photograph below, twelve of them stand on deck in matching white shirts, sails bagged along the rail, palms behind. Twelve names, not one. Harold will tell you the boat was the story; I'd say the boat was the kit, and the crew were the story.
Inés, my favourite kind of box score: two leg wins in the Southern Ocean, on a hull they rebuilt themselves, from a crew the press kept asking about their hair. Best answer to a bad question is a result, and Maiden filed twelve names' worth of them!
Inés, I'll happily take the kit side of it: that hull was a 1979 Bruce Farr aluminium design that had already been round the world in the Whitbread under another name and another owner before Edwards found her and her crew scraped her back to bare metal. A second racing life is rare in any fleet — boats, like locomotives, mostly get one.