All-female sailing team could be a game changer in round-the-world race

An all-female sailing crew will set out on a grueling round-the-world race on Saturday, and although the team is focused simply on the competition, its success could open the door for more women to join Volvo Ocean Race crews, which have generally been all male.

The team, named SCA for its Swedish sponsor, is the fifth all-female boat in the quadrennial contest’s 41-year history. This year all crews will be sailing identical boats: 65-foot monohulls. Modifications are not allowed, so architecture and materials won’t determine victory; athletes will.

The women of Team SCA see this as the best chance an all-female team has had at succeeding, and they hope that if they do, it will encourage more mixed-gender teams in future races.

“In my eyes, this is the first time an all-female team has been given all it takes to go out and try to win,” said Liz Wardley, 34, of Papua New Guinea.

The seven teams competing in the Volvo Ocean Race will leave from the eastern coast of Spain to navigate fierce Mediterranean storms, piracy threats, fishing nets, icebergs, the brutal Southern Ocean and the complicated waters where Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is believed to have disappeared in March. The race covers 38,739 nautical miles — nearly twice the earth’s circumference.

“It’s a very, very, very physical operation. It’s not just pure strength but endurance,” said Neal McDonald, a veteran of five Volvo races whose wife, Lisa, skippered the last all-female team, in 2001–02. Its boat broke a mast between Baltimore and La Rochelle, France; it rejoined the race and finished last.

Tacking the boat, or changing direction, which could happen 10 times a day, requires moving two to three tons of gear by hand while the boat’s platform is bouncing around the ocean. That means lifting 40,000 to 60,000 pounds per day on six hours of sleep or less.

To compensate for inherent strength differences, the women’s crew is allowed 11 sailors on board at once. All-male crews are limited to eight.

McDonald, who now works for rival crew Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing, said, “There are some very good sailors on SCA, and they’ve got more of them. They should be a force to be reckoned with, but we won’t know till the end.”

Living quarters would be tight for eight and even tighter for 11 people. It’s cramped, damp and stuffy and jokingly referred to as the carbon coffin. Every meal is freeze-dried and prepared in a sink and stove in a galley that is smaller than an office cubicle. Sleep shifts never exceed four hours, and sailors belt themselves into their bunks to avoid being violently ejected while the vessel tilts, creaks and whines to a roar. One change of clothes is allowed — never mind bathing.

The boats will stop in 11 countries on five continents, including one U.S. stop in Newport, Rhode Island, in May. After nine offshore legs — long races from country to country — and 10 in-port races — one-day races held in each port — whoever reaches Gothenburg, Sweden, by June 27 with the fewest points is the winner.

More than 400 women applied when SCA’s recruitment began in the fall of 2012.

“There were no obvious choices,” said Joca Signorini, SCA’s Brazilian coach. “It’s not like you were putting together a male team and would perhaps try to find some of the guys who had done the last race.”

SCA’s sailors hail from five nations. Three are Olympians; three competed in the last all-female Volvo team, in 2001–02; one is a sailmaker by trade; one has an engineering degree from Cambridge University; and another was a rower who helped Cambridge beat Oxford in the women’s version of the annual Boat Race on the River Thames. Two are sisters. Three have children. A few, like Dee Caffari, have circumnavigated the globe several times nonstop single-handedly.

In fact, Caffari, 41, is the only woman in history to have sailed solo around the globe in both directions. The “wrong” way took 178 days, she said of her 2006 westward voyage. The eastward route took half the time. But the Volvo Ocean Race lasts nine months.

“This is easier,” Caffari said of the Volvo race, because sailors get a break on shore between stages. But the intensity is higher.

“Volvo is three-week sprints,” she said. “The nonstop is a marathon. [In Volvo] you can’t miss anything. It’s all or nothing for three weeks, get to the finish line, sort out all the problems, have a rest, then do it again.”

U.S. Olympian Sally Barkow, 34, has had to make the opposite adjustment. The Wisconsin native has focused on in-shore racing for the past 10 years. “What I’d been doing was 20-minute match races or even one-to-two-hour races,” she said. “This is a totally different concept.”

And Annie Lush, 34, the Cambridge rower and an Olympic sailor, was used to 12-minute races. “It was like stadium racing, basically. Now I’m in the middle of the ocean with a whale to shout at you.” The biggest adjustment she found on the trans-Atlantic crossing was that “while you’re sleeping, someone else is working. I’d feel kind of guilty to rest in my off time if someone else was doing something.”

As with Tour de France teams, each crew is backed by a sponsor, which provides a $9 million to $14 million investment over two years, according to the race’s CEO, Knut Frostad. SCA was the first to sign on, specifically looking to create an all-female team because 80 percent of its retail customers are women.

The early investment meant that this spring, while most teams were still choosing crew members and some didn’t even have a boat, Team SCA already had its three coaches, 12 sailors and the chance to test equipment and team dynamics on an ocean crossing. 

“We’ve got no excuses this time,” Wardley said. “We’ve got the best resources, the best coaches.”

Despite some gender parity in high-stakes sailing events, including Olympic sailing and the America’s Cup, the Volvo Ocean Race is still male-dominated. The last time a woman participated in the Volvo race was in 2005, when Adrienne Cahalan navigated on Brasil 1 for the first leg of the race.

Crew member Abby Ehler, 41, said, “It comes down to opportunity. You would almost never get a chance to do this with a mixed team because [some think] there are just not the girls with the experience or physical strength to be worth a spot on a men’s boat. Since the opportunity hasn’t been there for so many years, it kind of has to be an all-female team. And it has to be run properly to ensure that we can prove ourselves and be competitive.”

Ehler’s hope is that the team will prove a strong competitor — even if it’s not at the top of the results board — and will be taken seriously. “It’s just a relief, from a sailor’s point of view, that we’re not just there as media tokens,” she said.

Caffari said, “I think this is the first step toward mixed teams being the norm.”

“You almost need to make this huge impact so in the next edition everyone maybe considers a mixed team because we proved we can do it. I think the shock tactic is going to help.”