As of Monday, Cole Brauer, the 29-year-old sailor who graduated from East Hampton High School in 2012, was within 2,000 miles of finishing the Global Solo Challenge singlehanded race around the world’s three great capes and heading for the Azores, though in an Instagram post that day she said she was sailing through “horrendous conditions” and dealing with choppy three-meter waves with winds up to 36 knots (41 miles per hour).
“On top of all the slamming,” she wrote, “there is a lot of water inside the boat. I have started to use the electric pump to pump out water every six to 10 hours. . . . There is water in the forward compartment and in the keel box. At least, I know the issues and the worst-case scenarios, and am monitoring them.”
It has, needless to say, been an arduous adventure for the 16-boat fleet whose competitors left A Coruna, Spain, in staggered starts beginning at the end of August. (Brauer, on First Light, a Class40, set forth from A Coruna on Oct. 29.)
Marco Nannini, the race’s organizer, reported last Thursday that “half have retired, and only five have not had to stop for emergency repairs. . . . A circumnavigation by sail is one of the most extreme and difficult sporting feats to bring to a successful conclusion. Fewer than 200 people have ever managed to do it solo and nonstop. . . . Unfortunately, a 40-to-60-percent success rate on a similar voyage is pretty normal.”
Philippe Delamare, a 61-year-old Frenchman with more than 100,000 sailing miles under his belt, was the first to cross the finish line, on Saturday afternoon, aboard Mowgli, an Actual 46. Nannini said that “building seas had knocked down and broke his boom. . . . Mowgli bears many scars, and the boom, snapped in half, really stood out. Philippe decided to tackle the winter storm that blew across the North Atlantic and to press on to the finish. A knock-down on Thursday nearly brought a disastrous end to his circumnavigation. . . . Fortunately, Philippe was able to continue to the finish without using his mainsail.”
Brauer and First Light, as of Monday, were still projected to cross the finish line next Wednesday. Should she finish, she would not only be the race’s runner-up, but also the first American female to sail solo around the world.
Her 400,000 Instagram followers saw her doing pull-ups in her cabin on Saturday, and listened to her say that her “tough, but fair” parents, David and Kim Brauer, who now live in Boothbay, Me., “instead of grounding me, as most of my friends’ parents would do, put me on a treadmill and made me run as fast as I could for at least 20 minutes in order to get my teenage angst out. . . . They pushed me extremely hard in cycling, rock climbing, and running. All other sports were not sports to their way of thinking. . . . All throughout school we had these physical tests, and my dad threw the girls metric out when we did them. ‘If the boys can do it, you can too,’ he would say.”