Sailing is one of the last bastions of patriarchy.
We weren't surprised that there was resistance to an all-female crew in the race. On the media's reaction to an all-female crew "I don't think there's one subject that we didn't cover in depth inside, outside and backwards." "We were always chatting, always talking," Edwards (left, with crewmate Mikaela Von Koskull) says of the Maiden's voyage. ," kind of thing, but you know, beggars can't be choosers. You know, you might get a bit of a snide, "Ugh, you know if you need help. And so they'd sit in a cafe and watch us as we were putting this boat together.Īlthough, as I say, there was a very nice part of that sort of, being part of this big Whitbread family, is that if you did go and ask for help, 99.9 percent of the time you would get it. So they didn't really need to do any work on them. This was also a bit of a first, because people didn't usually see women in shipyards. and then I gave the girls sledgehammers and I said, "Right, take her apart," and we did. She was in a terrible state, and we put her on a ship and we brought her back to the U.K. We found an old, secondhand racing yacht with a pedigree. On restoring an old racing yacht while the male crews had new boats
"Guys used to say to us, with absolute certainty, 'You're going to die.'"īut Edwards didn't back down: "We all became very aware, as a crew, as a team, that we were fighting for all women, and actually anyone who's been told they can't do anything," she says. "We had so much obstruction and criticism and anger," she says. The idea was unthinkable to many of the men in the world of yacht-racing, and backlash was intense.
In 1989, Edwards, then 26-years-old, assembled an all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Round the World Race. She was only able to sign on as a cook for an all-male team in the 1985-86 Whitbread Round the World Race, a grueling 33,000 mile endeavor.Īfterward, when she still wasn't able to crew, she decided to take matters into her own hands: "My mom always told me, 'If you don't like the way the world looks, change it,'" she says. But at the time, open ocean sailboat racing was a male-dominated sport. In the 1980s, Tracy Edwards dreamed of racing a sailboat around the world. "But I was shocked at the level of anger there was that we wanted to do this, because why is this making you angry?"Ĭourtesy of Tracy Edwards and Sony Pictures Classics " says Tracy Edwards, who assembled the first all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Round the World Race. "We weren't surprised that there was resistance to an all-female crew in the race.
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