Ellen MacArthur

Dame Ellen MacArthur , DBE (born July 8, 1976 in Derbyshire ) is a British sailor who is successful in regattas and who held the world record for the fastest circumnavigation in single-handed sailing for three years .

Ellen MacArthur

Life

Ellen MacArthur started sailing when she was a child. She bought her first dinghy, called Threepenny Bit , when she was 13 with the money she had spent years for school meals. At the age of 21, she contested her first one-handed regatta across the Atlantic - the 1997 Mini-Transat , in which she took 17th place. In 1998 she first attracted international attention when she won her boat class in the one-handed transatlantic regatta Route du Rhum .

In 2001, the 24-year-old became famous when she finished second in the Vendée Globe , currently the toughest race for single-handed sailors around the world. At that time she was alone with her boat Kingfisher (named after her sponsor Kingfisher plc ) for almost 100 days at sea, which she reported regularly via video camera.

In 2002 she won her boat class again with Kingfisher at the Route du Rhum.

On November 28, 2004 she began her world record run for the fastest non-stop one-handed circumnavigation of the world. It took 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds for her 27,348 nautical miles (approx. 50,648 km) long route on her trimaran B&Q , which is 75 feet (22.9 m) long and 16.2 m wide and had a mast height of 30.6 m and a weight of 8.3 tons. MacArthur circled Cape Horn 53 days after taking off from the southern British coast and crossed the ice areas in the Southern Ocean in record time, covering 501.6 nautical miles in the fastest 24 hours ( Etmal ) of the circumnavigation. On February 7, 2005, at 10:29:17 p.m. GMT, she reached the imaginary finish line at the entrance to the English Channel near the island of Ouessant in north-west France, breaking the fastest time of previous record holder Francis Joyon (72 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes, 22 Seconds) by 1 day, 8 hours, 45 minutes, which at MacArthur's average speed of 15.9 knots corresponds to approx. 532 nautical miles. The Brit held the record until January 2008, when Francis Joyon took it back with a time of 57 days, 13 hours and 34 minutes.

After completing her professional career as a sailor, she founded the Ellen MacArthur Foundation , a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the circular economy. Since 2006 she has given its name to Mount MacArthur on South Georgia in the South Atlantic .

Honors

• 2001 ISAF Rolex World Sailor of the Year Award (World Sailor of the Year)
• For her world record, she was raised to the nobility in 2005 by Elizabeth II (as the youngest woman) as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) .
• 2005 ISAF Rolex World Sailor of the Year Award (World Sailor of the Year)
• 2007 First honorary member (inductee) in the newly created ISAF Sailing Hall of Fame
• 2008 Knight of the Legion of Honor

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christopher Clarey (November 8, 2002). In the Arena: MacArthur back to face old foe. International Herald Tribune . (English; accessed February 22, 2008)
2. ^ ISAF Sailing Hall of Fame: Ellen MacArthur (Eng.); accessed on February 11, 2016.

further reading

• Ellen MacArthur: I wanted the impossible. How I sailed around the world alone. Munich: Piper / Malik, 2003, trans. v. Karl-Heinz Ebnet, 351 pages, ISBN 3-89029-222-4

Web links

Commons : Ellen MacArthur  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ellen MacArthur in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ellen MacArthur Foundation website (en)
• Website of Ellen MacArthur (s)
• The surprising finding from my solo circumnavigation (s) (TED lecture)