Documentary 2018 Dir: Alex Holmes 93 mins
Maiden opens in UK cinemas on Friday 8th March
This is a truly inspirational film. It takes us back a bit, though not too far, to 1989 and the Round the World Whitbread – a gruelling nine-month yacht race presided over by lantern-jawed skippers and winch-grinding gorillamen, testosterone bars and Viking-sized tales of life at sea, way out beyond the 100-fathom line, into the deep range, and then the slew to the south, into the daily distress of the dangerzone, where the roaring forties and south-of-the-convergence ice presented clear and present opportunities for death.
And women? In this scenario? Well let’s face it (you can hear the guys saying), they should just be shoreside and grateful to get laid. Shouldn’t they?
Back then
Well not Tracy Edwards. From having drifted out of school and into cooking on charter boats, which was something slightly less seasonal than grape-picking back then, she’d managed to get herself a berth on the ’85 Whitbread (as cook) and then had a dream to skipper the first all-female crew in a Whitbread. It’s easy to believe that this dream occurred when she got outside a bottle of wine, and most of us would probably leave it at that but for her it took hold and she got a crew together – of good people.
By now in the film, we are all on Tracy’s side. We’ve seen her uprooted from England to Wales after the death of her father, her zany days at school and a difficult-edging-on-violent relationship with a stepfather. And we get what the charter life was like… that it’s like being a servant, but with a backdrop normally seen behind film stars. And she does, we learn, make friends with the King of Jordan; we’re taking it for granted she’s not going to be a cook for long.
So how Tracy trod the sponsors’ trail, with less and less likelihood of being taken seriously, and while the men seemed to literally leer at her from behind the ramparts of their assumed-superiority, it comes as a bit of a shock to see her failure – knowing her as we do now.
Thank god she’d got some bricks and mortar by then (not many in their 20s can do that now), and she re-mortgaged to buy her yacht, a 1979 58ft Farr ally maxi, which then she needed to restore and prepare for the race. She manages to achieve this together with help from her friend, the King of Jordan. The boat was named Maiden.
Throughout this time though, Tracy seems the child of two fathers, at once buoyed by a gritty self belief and then in turn assailed by tremendous self-doubt. It makes for intense watching as we almost will her to get to the start-line while over the pool tables in the marina pubs they are making bets about whether she’ll give up before the Needles or whether she’ll make it to Anvil Pt.
There’s some candid corroboration from journalists and other pundits at the time, admitting the supposed age-old adage that women don’t go to sea… or even more cripplingly that “they” are bad luck. The sexism was bad enough at the time, and wrong – it was an open secret for instance that there were women serving in Nelson’s navy, but now it comes across as misogynistic.
By the time Tracy and the Maiden crew finish their first leg we are well aware of what an achievement this is; glass ceilings have been shattered like so much brash before an Antarctic icebreaker. And then it’s into the ice for real, the second leg, and heading south to save sea miles where her courage and determination pays off and she wins the leg.
The press though (ashamed to say this) are more about legs than the leg, and while Lantern Mustache and Jutjaw Ruggid are interviewed in-depth about their tactics and challenges the girls are persistently asked about their looks and the supposed inherent dysfunction of an all female team. The latter’s a myth of course, but three decades on it’s actually weird to watch this.
Of course Maiden wasn’t about beating the boys at the boys’ game in a boys’ way, and Tracy and her crew celebrate their femininity, famously wearing swimsuits as they entered port on the Florida leg and having the odd dash of pink about the place, like their shorts and the nubuck leather wheel covers.
Having won two out of the six legs of the race Tracy seems downbeat knowing she cannot win the last leg into the Solent (they’d be second in class). But she relays how at that point she realised how much more she and the crew had achieved with the huge welcome that awaited her return home.
Tracy and Maiden‘s new crew, ready to take off around the world again late 2018
Maiden and her people sailed into the history books, the glass ceiling smashed for good. Tracy would go on to big things in yacht race management before leaving sailing for nearly a decade before she found Maiden again in the Seychelles. The yacht had been abandoned and Tracy, who had had to sell her after the Whitbread Race, launched a crowd-funding campaign to bring her back in 2016 and restore her. Relaunched and ready for more sea-miles, Maiden left the Hamble in November and is now voyaging around the world again, and again with an all female crew, promoting education and opportunities for girls.
The film is a brilliant portrayal of a fight for a better life – you don’t need to know anything about sailing to enjoy it. For sailors some will question how Tracy made the leap from cook to skipper, but as she famously reports, she was underprepared and was learning as she went along.
Go and see this film! And see the trailer here: