Kirsten Neuschafer: Champion Yacht Racer

On April 27, 2023, Kirsten Neuschafer crossed the finish line of the Golden Globe Race after spending 233 days alone at sea, sailing a 36- foot-long boat around the world without any help. 

No GPS, no radar, no satellite. Instead, she navigated by the sun, the moon and the stars. She used paper weather maps and nautical charts to determine where in the world she was. Like the mariners of the past, it was her seamanship that counted above all else.

Her win changed the race forever, making the Golden Globe Race “a voyage for madmen and madwomen.”

A curiosity about the world and a fearless appetite for adventure have always been in Neuschafer’s DNA. Born on June 23, 1982, she grew up on the family farm outside of Pretoria, South Africa. She learned to sail dinghies as a child. Before becoming a professional sailor, she had plenty of adventures on land. 

In northern Finland she spent a few years training Huskies. She also worked as a wilderness guide in Spitzbergen, where she had a gun handy in case polar bears and other creatures invaded her tent.  At 22, traveling in Europe, Neuschafer wanted to fulfill her dream of seeing Africa.  Unable to afford a RV and undeterred by warnings and worries about a woman alone in Africa, she bought a bicycle in Germany, rode to Spain and ferried across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco. 

Over the next twelve months, she covered more than 9,300 miles—exploring the most spectacular and the remotest areas of the continent. She outwitted bandits and was detained by authorities who thought she was a spy. She also fell in love with the many villagers who were kind to a single woman on her own.  When she fell ill with malaria in the Central African Republic, they nursed her back to health and by the time she was well, she had become her host family’s “white daughter.”

After becoming a professional sailor in 2006, she worked as a delivery skipper, sailing boats to clients in the Caribbean, New Zealand, Europe, and North and South America. Sailing all around the world, she learned the unique challenges of the oceans and waterways at different times of the year.  She worked for a sailboat charter company, leading expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans, Patagonia and the Falklands. She chartered crews for National Geographic and the BBC television on their shoots in Antarctica and South Georgia Island.  

It wasn’t until 2019 when she had just delivered a boat for repairs in Maine that she learned about the Golden Globe Race. The race offered the adventure that Neuschafer craved, but she had no boat or money to buy one.  Her friends helped her find sponsors and raise enough money once she signed up for the race. The next two and a half years would be spent preparing for one of the most unique experiences of her life.

In the sailing world, the Golden Globe Race is the retro race of the sport.  It pays homage to the pre-high-tech days of the sport, specifically to a 1966 race by Sir Francis Chichester who sailed solo around the world in his ketch, the Gypsy Moth. He made only one stop in a record 274 days.  Two years later, inspired by Chichester’s feat, a new race to sail solo around the world without modern technology was born.

This challenging new race called for a non-stop global journey around three major capes. Only nine men entered that first competition in 1968. Of the nine, six quit before the end of the race, one committed suicide and the eighth man had to be rescued at sea when his boat sank. The winner, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and his yacht, Suhaili, finished in 312 days.

Knox-Johnston’s record stood for 50 years until 2018 when organizers revived the Golden Globe Race. They wanted the race to recall the romance of a simpler time, a race that could serve as an alternative to today’s modern races, where the biggest, most tech-ed out boats rule the waters. Instead, competitors had to sail on production boats, vessels that were mass produced. Any boat designed after 1988 and longer than 36 feet was not allowed to compete. Only devices that were in existence in 1968 would be allowed on board, such as wind-up clocks, radios, cassette tapes.

For the 2022 race, Neuschafer purchased a 1988 36’ Cape George model yacht in Newfoundland that fit the race requirements. But the boat needed a massive overhaul. New floors for the deck, a new mast, cabinets to store books and 100 jars of food for the long months at sea. On Prince Edward Island, a talented local welder and machinist, Eddie Arsenault, helped Neuschafer refit her boat. Between the two of them they did the majority of the entire refit spending all of 2021 on the restoration.

She wanted to know how every part of the boat worked so if she ran into trouble at sea, she would know how to fix the problem. In an interview, she said, “It’s not about having the latest technology: there is still a huge element of the unknown, a sense of adventure and a big element of luck.”

When the race began on Sept. 4, 2022, 16 boats sailed out of the harbor of Les Sables d’Orlonne, France to a 21-gun salute.  Two weeks later, one yacht shipwrecked in the Canary Islands. By early November, two more competitors had pulled out. One of them needed to be rescued from a life raft by Neuschafer whose boat was the closest to him. 

While her rivals ran into problems with water, equipment and weather, Neuschafer was making the most of the time.  Having survived alone in remote places, she was perhaps better prepared mentally for the solitude that often drives solo sailors on long voyages crazy.

She told her team, “I really enjoy not having a GPS because it forces me to be observant. I enjoy not having detailed weather forecasts because it forces me to think more, and because it’s a race and not a delivery, I like sailing the boat as fast as I possibly can.”   She read books, tried to learn Xhosa, a language spoken in South Africa, swam and wrote in her journal.

Race organizers tracked the journeys of each sailor and their boat, but since the sailors are not allowed to contact each other, Neuschafer had no idea how she or anyone else was doing. But the rest of the world knew. As she rounded Cape Horn in February, with 8,000 miles left, she was in the lead.  Then in March, she hit the doldrums, the zone around the equator where trade winds converge and often die, leaving ships at their mercy.  Once the winds changed, she sped straight for France arriving to a victor’s welcome on April 27, 2023. 

Not only was Neuschafer the first woman to win the Golden Globe Race, she also made history as the first South African sailor to circumnavigate the globe non-stop and unassisted.

 “I wanted to win, not as a woman,” she said. “I didn’t want to be in a separate category but to compete on equal terms with all the skippers.”  

2023 © Alice Look, Remarkable Women Project

Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project