British sailor Ellen MacArthur broke a solo round-the-world sailing record on Monday with a time of 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds, her control team said.
The 28-year-old MacArthur completed the 42 000km circumnavigation at 10.29pm (10.29pm GMT) by crossing an imaginary finish line between Ushant, France and the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall on the south coast of England.
MacArthur has battled stormy seas, gale-force winds, mechanical problems, a broken sail, burns, bruises and extreme exhaustion — even a close encounter with a whale.
Her 22,9m trimaran B&Q broke the record set by Francis Joyon, who set the mark of 72 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes and 22 seconds, in February 2004.
MacArthur, who planned to come ashore in Falmouth later, where a large media group was waiting, told supporters she was physically and mentally exhausted.
”She’s done an awesome job … it was right down to the line,” Mark Turner of Team Ellen told BBC television.
MacArthur is the sixth to attempt the feat in a multihull, the fastest and most extreme class of boats on the ocean.
Joyon, a Frenchman, set his record on a 27m trimaran, Idec. He broke the record of 93 days, three hours and 57 minutes set by Michel Desjoyeaux in the 2000/01 around-the-world Vendee Globe race, which is contested by 18m monohulls.
MacArthur’s journey began on November 28. Since then, she has slept an average of 30 minutes at a time and four hours in any one day.
Freeze-dried meals have been reheated on a single-burner stove in a living area measuring 1,5m high and 2m wide. Her water supply is desalinated from the sea.
MacArthur has had to fix her generators and water maker.
She spent Christmas Day in a storm, but after crossing the halfway mark at Cape Horn on New Year’s Eve, built up a four-day lead over Joyon’s pace. A week later, during the worst storms of MacArthur’s career, she badly burned her arm on the generator.
MacArthur twice had to climb the 30m mast to repair mainsail damage. During the climbs, she had effectively to sail backward to ensure safe conditions.
”What I have done wrong to deserve this?” she wrote in an e-mail on January 20. ”Everything we worked so hard for we are losing. It is so unfair. It has never been so hard.”
Struggling in bad weather, MacArthur fell a day behind Joyon’s pace. But, by late January, she was back in contention after crossing the equator. The boat hit a large fish and had a near miss with a whale, then light winds threatened. A storm on Saturday helped push her back into the lead.
MacArthur grew up in landlocked Derbyshire in northern England.
Her love of the sea began when she went sailing with her aunt in a dinghy at the age of four.
She spent the following years reading about sailing and saving up money from her school lunches to buy her own dinghy at 13.
By 18, MacArthur had sailed single-handed around Britain, the stepping-stone to competitive sailing.
In February 2001, MacArthur became the fastest woman and youngest person to sail alone around the world when she finished second in the Vendee Globe race, taking just more than 94 days to circumnavigate the world.
She was greeted in France by 35 000 people lining the coast and harbour of Les Sables D’Olonne. British Prime Minister Tony Blair called to congratulate her and she finished second to England soccer star David Beckham in a sports personality of the year award.
In 2003, MacArthur failed in a bid to set the fastest non-stop circumnavigation of the globe when the mast on Kingfisher 2, a crewed giant catamaran, broke in the Southern Ocean.
Last June, shortly before embarking on her current record bid, MacArthur failed by 75 minutes to set a new solo trans-Atlantic record in B&Q. — Sapa-AP