Meet the All-Woman Sailing Crew Racing Around the World

Despair didn't creep in until the tenth day? The eleventh? After more than a week of four-hour shifts punctuated by four hours of rest, no one could remember when it happened, but the sailors remembered where they were when their enthusiasm started to wane: the doldrums. A typically windless area around the equator, the doldrums have been the bane of sailors since humans first harnessed wind and tried to sail between the two hemispheres. For Team SCA of the Volvo Ocean Race—a ten-legged, round-the-world sailing race that started last month—this passage through the doldrums was particularly cruel.

"The fleet got a little jump on us," Stacey Jackson, one of Team SCA's Bowmen, explains by phone from Cape Town, where the race finished its first leg on November 7. In the doldrums, the SCA boat found itself windless, drifting like a cork in a swimming pool, while the rest of the boats somehow pulled out into the south Atlantic.

"Every six hours, we get a position report that gives us the other boats' positions and how much wind they had and how fast they're traveling," says Jackson. "So we sort of had three or four position reports—that's almost a day of watching the boats sail away from us—so the miles were ticking away and we were suddenly days behind the other guys. It was quite hard to keep positive about."

When their sails finally began to flutter, SCA was firmly in last place, about 300 miles behind the next-best boat.

The team's disappointment must have been compounded by the knowledge that some observers hadn't expected them to do any better. Team SCA is the Volvo Ocean Race's only all-female team. And in something as traditionally male-dominated as sailing, there were always bound to be haters.

SCA isn't the first all-women team to compete in the Ocean Race—in 1989, an Englishwoman named Tracy Edwards skippered the first all-women boat, The Maiden, around the world—but SCA is the first to enter the tri-annual race in more than a decade. More to the point, it's the most competitive all-women team the race has ever had.

Much of that competitiveness has to do with the boat. "In the past, the women's teams have generally been one of a two-boat campaign, and they've been the [slow] boat, basically," explains Jackson. "The men's team have done all the research and development and then they've built a faster boat, and they've given the slower one to the girls [who have also] taken the older sails and haven't had as much time preparing."

This year, all the teams are racing the exact same boat, the Volvo Ocean 65 Class. What's more, there are strict weight requirements which, depending on your point of view, might even give the women an advantage. Because the women are lighter, Team SCA's crew is three-to-four members bigger than its male rivals'.

Another factor is how Team SCA was built. "It is probably the first time in the race's history that there has been [an all-women] team that is being put together in the same way as an all-male team," Annie Lush, another crew member, commented earlier this year.

Hundreds of female sailors submitted CV's for Team SCA's 14 spots. (One of the 14, Corinna Halloran, isn't a sailor but an on-board reporter.) Nearly 50 women auditioned in front of the team's coaching staff. Jackson, who has been sailing for 24 years, began training full-time with Team SCA in September 2013. Another crew member I spoke with, trimmer-driver Sally Barkow, a former US Olympian, has been with the team since August, 2013.

All that experience and practice seems to have paid off, and if it weren't for the doldrums, who knows what could have happened? SCA led the fleet out of the Mediterranean, slipping through the Strait of Gibraltar and out into the Atlantic before anyone else, briefly losing sight of its competitors in the process. For the next five days, the entire fleet was in visual contact with one another.

And that despair the crew felt as it watched the fleet pull away from the equator? That was short lived too. "[After leaving the doldrums,] we realized we were just slowly going a little bit quicker than [Team MAPFRE]. Every six hours we were taking a few miles off them. We did this straight, every position report for the last week, pretty much, just slowly catching them, to the point where we did pass them just before the finish, with about an hour to go, we passed them into Cape Town."

In the previous edition, Team MAPFRE's captain won this leg. SCA made up 300 miles on him in a week.

The crew hopes their accomplishments will help women, in the words of Barkow, "bridge [the gender] gap and give them more opportunity." But helping change attitudes about women in sailing is only a part of what drives Team SCA.

"Nobody [on Team SCA] has done Cape Town to Abu Dhabi before, so there are a lot of unknowns," says Jackson. In the previous race, the boats skipped much of Africa's east coast, fearing pirates. "There's a lot to learn and experience, which for me is why I do this. Every day is a different experience. And as long as I'm still learning something as I'm still doing this, it's the right sport for me."

"Yeah," Barkaw agrees, before revealing a little of her inner Olympian. "The next leg, we believe we can be in the mix with these guys. We have the experience and the confidence for that. I think we can race with them."