Sail of the century

Intrepid sailor Sir Francis Chichester once called it “the impossible voyage” but that, and the odd iceberg field, didn’t stop Dee Caffari from becoming the first woman to solo circumnavigate the globe the hard way —”west about”.  David Woodward finds out how she did it. Portrait by Martin Burton

It’s a bit of a surprise to discover that Dee Caffari isn’t completely mad. When you consider what the 33-year-old sailor has just put herself through, you can’t help expecting her to be a little unhinged—a bit nuts, perhaps, to attempt something so outlandish. But when she bounds into view, all shades and toothy grin, your preconceptions vanish. The real Caffari is accomplished, grounded, and acutely aware of the scale of her achievement—she’s just become the world’s first woman to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe non-stop, against the prevailing winds and currents.

Short of pointing your own yacht towards Antarctica and setting sail, it’s difficult to appreciate how difficult a task that is. The following facts should add a little perspective: the late Sir Francis Chichester, who was probably better placed than most to gauge its difficulty, called it “the impossible voyage”; only four men have ever managed it before, the first, Caffari’s mentor Sir Chay Blyth, took 292 days—Caffari did it in 178; the fastest, Jean Luc van den Heede, who did it in 122 days, suffered four failed attempts before he succeeded in 2004.

Caffari managed it first time—day one of her voyage was her first proper experience of solo sailing. And whereas more celebrated sailors, such as Dame Ellen MacArthur, had a carbon-fibre boat specially developed for a speedy solo circumnavigation, Caffari was at sea for six months on a 72ft yacht designed for a crew of 18.
She laughs at the suggestion of madness, but concedes to a few healthy-under-the-circumstances “chats” with herself—and her boat. “I mean, I didn’t have a football with a face drawn on it or anything, but I talked to Aviva [the boat, named after its sponsors] quite a lot—she had a personality,” says Caffari. “We did a deal: I would look after her and she would look after me. When it was really horrible I’d hang on for the ride and she got me through it.”

Caffari is innately competitive, but she suspects the extra drive required to break such an obdurate world record came following the death of her father, who was a keen sailor himself. “He was a great one for asking ‘are you going to talk about it or are you going to do it?’” she says. But it was Sir Chay Blyth, experienced yachtsman and founder of Challenge Business, a sailing events company, who first planted the idea in her head. A year earlier, halfway through a Global Challenge race around the world, Sir Chay—impressed by her skippering skills—suggested to Caffari that she might have what it takes to become the first woman to solo circumnavigate the globe, “west about”. The idea frightened and captivated her in equal measure—and halfway through the final leg of the voyage, Caffari made up her mind to begin the search for a sponsor.

Sailing around the world “the wrong way”, against the earth’s spin, requires more than just a competitive nature. Going against the current means that if you pause to rest, the boat will start to go backwards. And with the wind striking the boat head on, west about sailors must continually tack—involving a zigzag rather than straight-ahead trajectory—to eke out as much forward motion as possible. Even with a large crew this is tiring but, alone, the mental and physical challenge is overwhelming.

Caffari ended up zigzagging an extra 4,500 miles. According to the team’s weather router, Mike Broughton, Caffari’s voyage required huge reserves of mental and physical stamina. “It’s hard-going beating against any strong wind, even in flatter seas,” he says, “but add bigger seas, while pounding into the teeth of a gale, and it makes life much more difficult.”

Throw in a few cyclones, Force 12 storms, and an iceberg “minefield” and you’ve probably got the worst weather conditions to hit a world record attempt in living memory. Asked to sum up Caffari’s luck at the halfway stage, Aviva project director Andrew Roberts put it like this: “Of the 50 crossings of the Southern Ocean made by Challenge yachts, this is the worst.” The Southern Ocean is the trickiest leg of the voyage; a treacherous hoop of water encircling 17,000 km of Antarctic coastline, it is as stern a test as any that a circumnavigator is likely to face. Cyclonic storms—created by the temperature contrast between the ice and the open ocean—swirl its waters to produce the strongest average winds found anywhere on the planet. Caffari spent more time in the Southern Ocean—almost 90 days—than any other solo yachtsman in sailing history.

Navigating her way through storm after storm, she spent as much time crawling along the deck as she did sailing. One minute she would be working a winch, the next minute a wall of icy water would pick her up and toss her 30 feet down the deck. The worst of conditions produced waves up to 40 feet high. “The noise is absolutely deafening,” she says. “If you drive a convertible down the motorway, in the rain, with the roof down in pitch black without any headlights—that’s what I was sailing in for most of the Southern Ocean.”

With so much time on board, and so little of it spent sleeping, the psychological battle can be as debilitating as the physical strain. What games will the exhausted mind play 2,000 miles from the coast, with only the howling wind and rain for company? Caffari struggled even on the relatively easy Atlantic leg of the voyage. The days dragged, she slept and ate very little. “It’s hard to get used to not handing over when you go below,” she says. “You spend half your time waiting for someone to come up through the hatch. I was too scared to leave the deck at first.”

It didn’t take long for the feeling of isolation to intensify. “Instead of a 15-hour day and then a night time, I suddenly had 24 hours of day to occupy myself.” Caffari slept for no longer than an hour and twenty minutes at a time on the whole six-month voyage, but usually grabbed much less than that. “You’re always on the edge,” she says. “I found a happy medium of making informed decisions on four hours of sleep out of 24. But it was mostly cat-naps of 20 to 40 minutes.”

With her resistance wearing thin, and after a violent 72-knot tropical storm, which she battled through in the pitch dark “unable to see in front of my nose”, she reached the equator in reasonably good spirits, but the failure of her autopilot, one of the few gadgets that a single-handed sailor really can’t do without, was probably news she could have done without. The autopilot steers the ship in a straight line, allowing the solo sailor to change the sails, make a cup of tea, service a winch, or grab some sleep. Without it, continuing the voyage into the Southern Ocean unassisted would be impossible. “That was the hardest thing,” she says, “because I thought it would only fail due to a weakness from me. I didn’t think that a technical problem could jeopardise the voyage.”

On Christmas morning, after several attempts to patch it up, Caffari’s autopilot finally gave up the ghost. Spewing hydraulic fluid and sounding alarms that bore no relation to events ahead, the autopilot “had lost its will to live”. Caffari, reduced to tears of frustration, almost felt the same way. It took an Apollo 13-style miracle to fix it. Back in Southampton the technical team was looking for a way to add an expansion tank, using only parts found on Caffari’s boat. They realized that the fittings for the gas pipes to the oven were exactly the right breadth for the job. “That left me with no oven,” she says, “which meant that I couldn’t make bread any more—but, on balance, I think the autopilot was slightly more important.”

Autopilot intact, Caffari rounded Cape Horn and sailed into the Southern Ocean, steering straight into a succession of malicious, fast-moving storms. The first onslaught lasted nine days and required constant course alterations in an attempt to avoid the worst effects. In her online diary, Caffari recalls “mountainous blue-grey seas with wild foaming tops” and “bottomless troughs that sucked you down” amid “walls of icy cold seawater that broke and covered whatever was in its path”. Aviva, she wrote, “went from being a 45-tonne steel yacht, charging forward with purpose, to being a cork lost in an endless watery landscape that was wild with fury”.

Before she hit the Southern Ocean, Caffari was well on target to beat Mike Golding’s time of 164 days. Golding, was second to complete the circuit, after Sir Chay. But Caffari says his run was far smoother. “He didn’t see any of the weather I saw in the Southern Ocean, none of the storms or the ice that I encountered,” she says. “When I got down to Cape Horn I was pretty level with his time and I wanted to push it, but once I got in the Southern Ocean it was a case of survival rather than pushing for time.”

That grip on survival was beginning to look increasingly tenuous. About 1,670 miles off the coast of South America, as far away from land as it’s possible to get, Caffari was still receiving weather reports to make the blood run cold. This far out to sea, any accidents are life threatening. Around 1,000 miles off the south west coast of Australia, lightening struck Aviva’s mast, damaging Caffari’s wind instruments. Thinking the storm had passed, she overcame her vertigo and scaled the mast to make the necessary repairs—only to get stuck about 60 feet up. “With all my weight on the climbing gear I was struggling to change from ascend to descend,” she recalls. With the boat sailing itself, the bad weather returned. Wedged so far up the mast, every pitch and roll of the boat was magnified. “I was swung all over
the place like a rag doll,” she says.

Caffari was stranded for a gruelling hour and a half, before she freed herself. Mentally exhausted, her arm bruised black, it probably wasn’t the ideal time for more bad news, but just past the 100-day mark, a field of icebergs drifted into view. Even with a steel hull, Aviva’s frame would be no match for an iceberg at 30 knots. Sinking in the freezing Southern Ocean, thousands of miles from potential rescue, was a real possibility. Caffari steered a vigilant course, not even leaving her lookout post to eat. “The year before,” recalls Caffari, “we had 12 boats, all desperate to see an iceberg. We didn’t see a single one. But sailing with Aviva, I was surrounded by ice for three days. The moment I left the ice for the first time was the epiphany—that was when I realised if I could handle that I could handle anything. I knew I was going to do it.”

Caffari reached the finish line, just off the coast of Cornwall, on the 18th May, after 178 days, three hours and five minutes at sea. Her boat had covered 29,227 punishing nautical miles, every single one fought for against dragging currents and constant head winds. “What did I miss? Well, apart from this,” she says, tapping the Diet Coke in front of her, “I missed interaction. The non-verbal communication that you take for granted when you see people face-to-face.”

Three members of the Aviva team, including coach and boyfriend Harry Spedding, jumped aboard at the finish line for the 72-hour journey back to a rapturous homecoming in Southampton. “I laughed for three days solid,” she recalls. “They were telling me it wasn’t that funny, but having people to react to after so long on my own—they just made me laugh. If you think about it,” says Caffari, “for six months there really hadn’t been that much to laugh about.”

“The noise is absolutely deafening. If you drive down the motorway, in the rain, with the roof down in pitch black without any headlights—that’s what I was sailing in”