And that was just one day. Day 80, to be exact, out of 100 or so that MacArthur will have spent at sea before she sets foot again on dry land. The 5-foot-2, 24-year-old Englishwoman is the youngest sailor ever to compete in the Vendee Globe, a singlehanded, 26,000-mile race so grueling it’s called the Everest of sailing. MacArthur has been among the front runners since the race began in November off Les Sables d’Olonne on France’s southwestern coast. She and 23 other sailors have circumnavigated Antarctica and rounded Cape Horn, and now are heading back across the Atlantic to Les Sables–with MacArthur hot on the tail of first-place Michel (Le Professeur) Desjoyeaux. “She impresses me,” says Catherine Chabaud, the other woman in the race. “I don’t know if it’s thoughtlessness due to her age or hypermotivation to be in the lead pack. But sometimes she scares me, especially when I see her navigating between growlers [small icebergs].”
Not bad for someone who grew up in landlocked Derbyshire and whose childhood sails were limited to puttering around the Essex coast. Once, when she was home sick, MacArthur, then 12, watched the Whitbread Round the World Race on television. Inspired, she saved up enough lunch money to buy an eight-foot dinghy. By the time she was 18, she owned a 21-foot pocket cruiser that she sailed around Britain solo. While living on her little boat for two years, she wrote more than 2,500 letters asking for sponsors to back her in competition. With only two replies, she headed to France, where she did well enough in the 2,700-mile Mini-Transat to get her first major sponsorship, from Kingfisher Plc, a retail conglomerate.
The sailing-crazed French have dubbed her the “Jeune espoir de la voile” (“Sailing’s Young Hope”). Now with her performance in the Vendee, her fame has spread to Britain–and beyond. As the race enters its likely final week, she is finally out of the freezing Southern Ocean. In one of the e-mails MacArthur regularly sends her race team via satellite, she summed up the Southern: “It wants everything, and when you have nothing left, it wants twice as much again.” Win or lose, MacArthur seems prepared to give as good as she gets.
