Yachting: Heroine takes on the world

SUZANNE McFADDEN reports on the solo sailor about to realise her dream.


Ellen MacArthur, a tiny yachtswoman in her 20s dressed in dog-hair socks, is on the verge of becoming world-famous.

Tomorrow night she sets sail non-stop round the world in her New Zealand-made yacht - alone, but among a fleet of 24 boats - with a very good chance of becoming the youngest sailor to win the Vendee Globe.

MacArthur makes a fine heroine.

She is the English girl who saved all her school lunch money for three years to buy her first boat, the teenager who slept on school floors and in boatsheds to try to scratch together enough to pay for her dream of sailing around the world.

MacArthur is the talk of the dock at Les Sables d'Olonne, the French port where the 26,000-mile race begins and ends.

She is a favourite, not only because she is a friendly, 24-year-old sparrow of a woman, not least afraid to tackle the wilds of the Southern Ocean singlehanded in a 60ft boat, but because she could win.

She upstaged some of the world's great single-handed sailors to win the solo transatlantic race four months ago.

"I never imagined I would be in a position where people were following me for autographs, or waiting hours on the pontoon to see me just emerge from the cabin," MacArthur said this week, as she waited for the race to start.

"Inside I feel like the same Ellen who would spend hours hanging off a pontoon playing with the water, or exploring muddy creeks in a dinghy. I hope that people can still see this."

The transatlantic victory was MacArthur's first race in her new boat Kingfisher, built at Marten Marine in Auckland.

It was launched during the America's Cup, before she sailed it 1200 miles home, from Auckland to Plymouth, England.

"It was the realisation of my childhood dream to launch Kingfisher in New Zealand," she said.

"If you multiply that feeling by about 100, then you're getting close to the feeling I have inside me right now.

"[The boat] is the most beautiful Open 60 I could imagine."

MacArthur is one of two women in the Vendee Globe fleet.

The other, French sailor Catherine Chabaud, became the first woman to finish a non-stop round-the-world race four years ago.

Also in the fleet is Raphael Dinelli, who was dramatically rescued from the Southern Ocean by fellow competitor Pete Goss in the last race.

There are a couple of America's Cup sailors going it alone, a French motorcycling champion and a Russian adventurer who has scaled the world's highest mountains and trekked solo to both Poles.

MacArthur's passion for sailing began as an eight-year-old who went on sailing holidays with an aunt. She hoarded her school money to buy a boat at 13, and made her first single-handed journey six years ago, when she sailed around Britain.

Suddenly, the staunch English yachting fraternity were forced to take a second glance at the 1.59m-tall teenage girl from the landlocked county of Derbyshire.

From that moment, she set her sights on sailing around the world, and wrote 2500 letters to sponsors. She received two replies.

But two years ago, she convinced European retailer Kingfisher to back her Vendee Globe campaign for £2 million.

Through the sponsorship, she has been working in child cancer wards in hospitals in France. It has had a profound effect on her.

"When you're out [at sea] and it's really bad, it's the people who are thinking of you that really make the difference," she said.

"It's the kids from the hospital in Vill Jeuf, my team or my family who drive me on. Giving up is simply not an option."

MacArthur is already famous in France, a nation fascinated with round-the-world sailors. She has two websites on the internet, a clothing line and a video on "her life so far."

One of the hardest things for the young yachtswoman, heading out to sea for at least 105 days, is leaving behind her dog, Mac.

But she has vowed to wear her pair of dog-hair socks throughout the voyage to remind her of her best friend.