By Peter de Graaf - RNZ
A young Northland woman has made history as part of the first all-female crew to sail non-stop around the world.
Rebecca Gmuer-Hornell, of Ōpua, in the Bay of Islands, is also believed to have broken the New Zealand record for circumnavigating the globe by any sailor, male or female.
Her time, of 57 days, 21 hours and 20 minutes, is more than 16 days faster than the previous 74-day record set by Sir Peter Blake in 1994.
The 26-year-old was competing for the Jules Verne Trophy, awarded for the fastest circumnavigation of the world, and crossed the finish line off the French coast at around midnight Monday NZT.
Gmuer-Hornell told RNZ the race was a huge mental and physical challenge.
“But it’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a little girl, to finally get it done for myself and for the sport. I don’t think I actually realised the magnitude of what we were doing until we came back, the amount of support we’ve had and congratulations from everyone has been insane and we are super grateful for it,” she said.
“I think it shows that women around the world have been following it and looking up to us. And I hope it inspires young girls to think they can do it, because we were finally able to put this record in the books for women.”
Gmuer-Hornell was part of the eight-strong Famous Project crew sailing on a 31.5m maxi trimaran, IDEC Sport.
The vessel was captained by sailing legends Alexia Barrier (France) and Dee Caffari (UK), both of whom had sailed around the world multiple times, solo and crewed; while her crewmates included Olympians Tamara Echegoyen (Spain) and Annemieke Bes (Netherlands).
Gmuer-Hornell said she was surprised an all-female, non-stop circumnavigation had not been done before.
“But it’s just because there hasn’t been the opportunity for women to sail these boats that do high-speed records. It’s definitely a male-dominated thing. So it’s really cool to have been given the opportunity to sail a maxi trimaran for starters, let alone take it around the world.”
She was still trying to take in breaking Sir Peter Blake’s New Zealand record.
“Sailing has come a long way since then and innovation has been huge since Peter Blake went around the world, but being up in the leagues with him is something I never, ever dreamed of. I think I’m slowly getting my head around it, but it’s been such a whirlwind over the last couple of days, it’s going to take a little while to sink in.”
Gmuer-Hornell was the boat’s rigger and port pitman, and at the last minute was also tasked with the job of drone operator.
Before their November 28 departure, she anticipated the Southern Ocean would be the scariest part of the voyage.
“But it’s such a quick boat, we were able to outrun all the low-pressure systems. You can position yourself in the Southern Ocean in places that are better for the wind and waves, but coming back up the Atlantic, now it’s winter, there’s a lot of low pressures coming into Europe from the west and that’s a lot harder to navigate,” she said.
“You have to go through them, you have to be in those eight-metre swells, liquid Himalayas we call them, and you have to be in that 50 knots of breeze. That was probably the most challenging part, the last 1000 miles.”
As for the most memorable part of the journey, Gmuer-Hornell said it was rounding Cape Horn.
“We call it the Everest of sailing. Someone came out with a statistic that only 25 women have rounded Cape Horn and that fewer people have gone around the Cape than have gone up Mount Everest. So it was a pretty big milestone for me.”
Gmuer-Hornell said conditions were “pretty good” with a 3m swell and 25-knot winds, giving her a chance to fly the drone around the infamous cape.
“That was another really cool thing to do. Not many people have flown drones from maxi trimarans around Cape Horn. It was amazing.”
Gmuer-Hornell said there were several sailing legends and seven nationalities on board, which made for some “cool cultural dynamics”.
“It worked really well. The boat language was English, so that made it quite easy for me, but communication was easy. We all got on super well.”
Gmuer-Hornell said her advice to girls and young women who wanted to take up sailing was to seize every opportunity that came their way.
“You miss 100% of the opportunities that you don’t take. This opportunity was the biggest one I’ve ever been given and it was one that seemed near-impossible and we managed to pull it off, even though we had a lot of technical issues and there were a lot of times we thought we wouldn’t make it. But we overcame all of them. You’ve just got to keep trying.”
After 57 days at sea, the first thing she ate in the French port city of Brest was an oyster.
“Freeze-dried food does get pretty mundane after a while. Alexia [Barrier] and I are obsessed with oysters, so we requested that and our wish came true.”
The Famous Project crew had only been back on land a few days but Gmuer-Hornell said they were already planning their next attempt at the trophy, on another boat.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to push the boat a bit harder than we were this time. We had a lot of technical difficulties, we know where we lost time and we think we can beat our current record.”
The Jules Verne Trophy course starts and finishes at a line between Cornwall in England and Brittany in France and takes sailors around the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), Cape Leeuwin (Western Australia) and Cape Horn (Chile).
There are no restrictions on the type of yacht or number of crew, but the race must be completed non-stop with no outside assistance.
The last attempt to claim the trophy by an all-female crew, led by British sailor Tracy Edwards in the year 2000, came unstuck when her vessel lost its mast in the South Pacific.
The current Jules Verne Trophy holder is Frenchman Thomas Coville, who set a time of just over 40 days on the trimaran Sodeno Ultim 3 earlier this year.
The trophy is named after the French writer Jules Verne, who penned the 1872 novel Around the World in Eighty Days.
Gmuer-Hornell is the daughter of Ōpua couple Manuela Gmuer-Hornell and Chris Hornell, a sailor and outboard mechanic who has driven chase boats in multiple America’s Cup campaigns and more recently with SailGP.
Gmuer-Hornell trained as a yacht rigger in Auckland and recently relocated to the UK, where she finished second in the 2025 Admiral’s Cup, representing the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, and competed in the Ocean Race Europe aboard Team Amaala.