Fifteen-foot waves crashed over the deck of Cole Brauer’s 40-foot racing yacht, First lightin the choppy Indian Ocean as she tried to keep her balance in the cramped aft cockpit.
The normally reliable ship’s autopilot feature malfunctioned, forcing the 29-year-old skipper to steer the wobbly rudder with her feet and manage the lines of two sails with each hand as she navigated one of the most dangerous stretches of the Indian Ocean. . Solo.
“I’m trying to get rid of the sails because I can’t control the boat,” the Long Island, New York, resident tells PEOPLE, recalling the harrowing experience in December.
“But I can’t leave the helm.” she says. “It’s like driving a car on the highway and you don’t have gas or brake. All you have is this loose steering wheel. I was free-falling down the waves, I was going so fast that I reached the fastest speed I’ve ever reached on this boat, I was just flying and then free-falling.”
Her ocean toboggan ride became an added challenge because she had just injured—or perhaps broken—a rib when rough seas tossed her over the cabin earlier in the trip. “Every movement is this shooting pain,” she says.
But Brauer continued. Using both arms and legs “like Mrs. Octopus,” she says, she took off the sails, secured everything tightly and let the boat float free to fix the autopilot problem. “I fixed it,” she says. “It took me two days to solve the problem.”
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While her team in the US monitored the situation from afar via the Starlink satellite internet service, Brauer had no choice at that point but to rely on herself. “It’s not like you can quit,” she says. “You are in the middle of the ocean. There is no giving up. No one will come to save you. So it’s like, ‘Smoke it. Solve the problem.’ In the end it’s just you. You have to keep moving forward.”
This can-do, can-do attitude is what has made Brauer a rising star in the racing world. It’s also what’s kept her going as she works toward an ambitious, historic goal: to be the first American woman to race solo around the world.
“We’re doing it!” says Brauer, referring to himself — and First Light.
Of the 16 skippers in the inaugural Global Solo Challenge, a non-stop race that starts and ends in A Coruña, Spain, she is the only woman and the youngest. And, at 5 feet 100 lbs., he notes, he’s the smallest — something he sees as an advantage.
“To make it here as a hundred-pound girl is a dream come true,” she says.
Beginning October 29, 2023, Brauer and First light, along with six other ships, set sail from A Coruña. She traveled along the West African coast, rounding South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, before heading to the Indian Ocean, where she rounded Cape Leeuwin in Australia before heading across the Pacific to South America.
On January 26, she reached what is considered the “Everest” of her career by circumnavigating Chile’s Cape Horn, surviving the notoriously deadly Drake Passage, the turbulent strait connecting the Pacific and Atlantic between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands, just above Antarctica.
Becoming a member of that exclusive club was not easy. “It’s insidious,” she says. “All sailors know that it is the hardest ocean in the world. The reason sailors have so much respect for the Southern Ocean is because so many people have lost their lives in the Southern Ocean.”
Over a period of about four months, she and the other skippers cover 27,000 miles in the race. With the postponed start, the sailboats will finish on different dates. He expects to finish at the beginning of March.
At press time, she was in second place behind Mowgli, skippered by French skipper Philippe Delamare. The third-placed boat was more than 1,400 nautical miles behind her and had not yet reached Cape Horn.
Having grown up in a non-sailing family – her father is an entrepreneur and her mother once owned a small shop that sold dance and workout clothes – with no connections in a tight-knit, male-dominated world, she is proud of that how far she has come.
This July, she took part in the Bermuda One-Two race, not only winning the yacht race, but also becoming the first woman to do so. It was a turning point in her career.
Before that, although she used to race, she says, “Nobody took me seriously. I was always just ‘the girl in the van.'” (In the US, she lives out of a van, sometimes in Maine, where her parents live, or in coastal towns like which are Newport, Rhode Island, where she prepared First Light, and Mystic, Connecticut.)
“Having a win come out of that said, ‘She’s not just messing around. We’re getting what you’ve been doing all these years.'”
At the same time, she says, “It shows that we women can do anything you can do. We don’t have to keep following in your footsteps. We’re the ones leading the way now.”
The calm after the storm
PEOPLE spoke to Brauer via Zoom during a rare moment of silence, when she and First Light were about 400 miles northeast of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, off the coast of Argentina.
“It was blowing 35 knots last night and then that front came over me and now it’s like glass out there,” she says, stepping out onto the deck and showing a 360-degree view of the ocean itself, wet laundry draped overboard drying in the sun — and a bird floating on the surface nearby. “He’s been with us”—meaning her and the ship—”for about three hours now,” she says. “He just sits next to me and hangs out.”
The tranquility gave her a chance to take a well-deserved break, which included a full-body “sun shower” on deck using water from a solar-heated bag instead of a bucket. “This is a spa day,” he says with a laugh. “I cleaned myself up a bit. I’m eating, I’m trying to be a little more human today compared to the last two months when I felt like an astronaut.”
Cole Brauer in July 2023 after winning the Bermuda Race One-Two.
Serena Village
Sailing across the South Seas — the stretch from Cape Good Horn in South Africa to the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific through Chile with Antarctica to the south — “is like being on Mars, but a lot wetter,” she explains. “It’s empty, there’s nothing around, and you’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
Cold and violent, storms, she says “just come and come and all you do is just try to avoid them as best you can. Sometimes you can do a really good job avoiding them, and sometimes they just run over you. Then you have to deal with the mess after cleaning the ship and making sure you’re still alive.”
During her journey, she reached Point Nemo in the South Pacific, the part of the ocean furthest from land. “The closest to humans was the International Space Station,” she says.
The calmer waters of the South Atlantic present their own challenges. “You get this low wind or no wind and a lot of people go crazy,” she says. “But I’m really happy to be in this light wind, because it gives me a second to relax after dealing with hurricane force winds time and time again.”
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For Brauer, a typical day during the race means waking up at the crack of dawn — according to UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, which is five hours ahead of Eastern Time.
“I’ll get up, I’ll go outside and just check things and make sure there’s nothing floating in the water behind me,” she says. “You’ll find random things from the ship trailing you after a crazy night.”
Among them, “trash that drags on the rudders,” she says, “and I have ropes from the ship that just drag behind me.”
She prepares for the day, first checking the weather forecast. “I always download it almost as soon as I get up in the morning to find out what’s going to happen,” she says. “I download the weather all the time, as much as I can, especially now with Starlink.”
He meets with his team virtually every day, checks in with them in a group chat. This includes her time manager, project manager and medic who monitors her health.
He does “a little exercise to get the joints moving. There’s no heat on the ship, so it’s just damp and cold and you feel rundown.”
This is followed by breakfast, which usually consists of tea and oatmeal. “I’m actually running out of oatmeal. It’s really depressing.”
He posts daily updates about his journey on Instagram and on his website, colebraueroceanracing.com.
She cooks by heating water in a stream, adding it to prepackaged, freeze-dried food. One of her favorite dinners is Peak Refuel Sweet Pork and Rice.
When it’s bedtime, she curls up in her bed — a sleeping bag on top of a bean bag tucked into the engine compartment and four fleece pillows custom-made by her friend Jeff Samas of Straight Line Fabrication in Somerset, Massachusetts.
Near her bed is her navigation station, with a computer screen in the middle. “It has radar and cameras,” she says. “I have one looking out. And so I can look outside from my bed.”
When he’s not battling hurricane-force winds, he’s enjoying his vacation. “I read a lot of books,” she says. “I listen to a lot of podcasts. The music is great, I always have the speaker on. I think it helps in life.”
While Amazon obviously can’t deliver the chocolate or oatmeal it wants, it still has Netflix. “I’ve probably watched more Netflix movies than I’ve ever watched,” she says. “I’m currently re-watching 2000s rom-coms. Today’s movie is Pretty Woman.”
Mostly, though, she credits keeping in touch with her trusted team and longtime friends who help her through her loneliest moments — all thanks to technology.
“It was great, definitely, interacting with people,” she says. “I had dinner with a couple of my girlfriends for one of my girlfriend’s birthdays, and they dressed up, and I had pasta here, and we talked, and they had dessert, and I ate the rest of my chocolate bar. That was the end of my chocolate bar.”
He is also in contact with his parents who live in Maine. “I face my mom every morning,” she says.
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Sunset in the South Atlantic in January 2024.
Cole Brauer
Although floating in her “40-foot bubble” has allowed her to shut out most of the modern world, she can still perform tasks. “Regarding Starlink, I was on the phone with my dad yesterday, because I want to buy a car,” she says. “I was on Facebook Marketplace looking for a little Mini Cooper.”
She adds: “I invite my dad to go test drive these little couple of big Mini Coopers or whatever. So it’s weird that you’re still living the same life, you’re just doing it from afar.”
One of the perks of living on a boat in the middle of the ocean is being able to admire some of the most beautiful sunsets on Earth.
Or just relax, immerse yourself in the starry sky above and just be.
“I have this little black mat that I kind of lie on,” says Brauer. “I bring my own pillows and sleeping bag, and sometimes I’ll snuggle up on the side of the cockpit.” She adds, “And it’s so beautiful because in the tropics you have the Milky Way and it goes down and it’s like a waterfall and you can’t tell where the ocean starts and the sky ends.”
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Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education