All Hail Ellen…!
She’s across the finish in 71d 14h 18m 33 seconds, beating the unbeatable by 1 day 8 hours 36 minutes and 49 seconds. It took a superhuman effort, but she is now the fastest solo circumnavigator…EVER. In the South Atlantic it looked as if she would be done in by generator problems. At Cape Horn it looked as if she might smash the record by 3-4 days. At the Equator it looked as if she was the unluckiest sailor ever to cleave a wave and might not break the record at all. And in the Bay Of Biscay, as fate teased her with the possibility of breaking the record, it threw a vicious, North Atlantic storm into her path, as if to test her seamanship, and the durability of her tri, before deeming her worthy of an epic, record-breaking finish.
It was quite a ride, and I’m not really sure where she can go from here. There’s no solo sailor and boat out there–other than Francis Joyon and IDEC should he care to make another run at the record–who can challenge her time in the forseeable future. Sure, she can go out and nail the solo transatlantic record and the solo 24-hour record to take the Triple Crown, but compared to the Big One, it will be a bit anticlimactic. Should she go back and try to win the Vendee in 2008? Should she go back to maxi-multihulls? Who knows. Ellen reminds me of a sailing Alexander the Great, who in his twenties is said to have broken down and wept because he had no worlds left to conquer…
Ellen Triumphant: “But I’m crying inside. Really…”
