Super Sailor: Springs Native Cole Brauer Is First American Woman to Race Sailboat Solo Around the World 

As Cole Brauer raced her sailboat alone around the southern tip of Africa, the area’s notoriously rough seas rocked her vessel, tossing the Springs native across the cabin, breaking one of her ribs.

The 29-year-old woman was barely a month into the inaugural Global Solo Challenge — a 30,000-mile circumnavigation competition that started and ended in Spain — when she suffered the injury while passing the Cape of Good Hope, where cool Antarctic waters and warm Indian Ocean currents combine to fuel stormy weather. Despite the injury, she powered through the pain, weathered additional storms, made mechanical repairs and posted upbeat social media videos for fans who followed her four-month-long journey. In the end, she sailed into history, placing second overall and becoming the first American woman to race a sailboat solo around the world.

“Reminds me so much of growing up on Eastern Long Island,” she ironically wrote in one post while marveling at the beautiful weather just days before the incident off the cape. “Winter time on the beach, the grayish blue, the whitest white caps, the smell is the same, and has that same chilly air. So raw and unfiltered. The ocean is a magical palace! No matter where you are.”

No doubt, she bore witness to that magic up close and personally. The race route took more than a dozen competing sailors around the three great capes in the Southern Ocean — after Africa, she passed Australia’s Cape Leeuwin and South America’s Cape Horn, where she played cat-and-mouse with another dangerous storm — before sailing back up the Atlantic to A Coruña, the same port of origin from which the Spanish Armada set sail in 1588.

Along the way, she traversed 30-foot waves, encountered countless marine life and sailed through Point Nemo — the most remote place on Earth farthest from land anywhere in the world.

The 5-foot-2-inch Brauer, who set sail on Oct. 29, was the only woman among more than a dozen sailors who were among the fleet of solo skippers competing in the challenge. The race took her 130 days to complete.

“This is really cool and so overwhelming in every sense of the word,” Brauer told NBC News before drinking Champagne from her trophy on March 7 while being celebrated by family and fans.

While Brauer is the first American woman to race around the globe alone by sea, she is not the first woman to do so. Polish sailor Krystina Chojnowska-Liskiewicz finished her 401-day voyage around the globe on April 21, 1978, according to online sailing sites. Kay Cottee of Australia was the first woman to achieve the feat nonstop, sailing from Sydney Harbor in Australia in November 1987 and returning 189 days later.

The global voyage is not an easy one, even on a vessel with a full crew. At one point she had to give herself an IV to stave off dehydration.

“Solo sailors, you have to be able to do everything,” Brauer told the Today show on the day she returned to land. “You need to be able to take care of yourself. You need to be able to get up, even when you’re so exhausted. And you have to be able to fix everything on the boat.”

Not all who participated crossed the finish line, with some competitors docking early due to mechanical failures they could not fix alone at sea.

Satellite communications allowed Brauer to stay in touch with her racing team and connect with fans on social media, where she posted videos from the race and her boat, “First Light.” Sailing solo means not just being a skipper but a project manager, said Marco Nannini, the race’s organizer. That means steering the vessel, knowing the weather and keeping yourself healthy, he said.

“The biggest asset is your mental strength, not the physical one,” Nannini said. “Cole is showing everyone that.”

She celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s alone on the boat. While she is smiling in most of her videos at sea, one of Brauer’s social media posts from Dec. 8 showed her frustration.

“I haven’t really had the bandwidth to get into everything that’s been going on the past 48 hours, but the short version is the autopilot has been acting up again and I needed to replace some parts and do a rudder recalibration,” she wrote. “For once the light air is actually helping, but it’s been exhausting, and I’m sore and tired.”

“It’s all part of the journey, and I’m sure I’ll be feeling better once the work is done and I’ve gotten some sleep,” Brauer added. “But right now things are tough.”

But she’s handled the difficulty, even though some in the sport believed it wouldn’t be possible due to her gender and small frame.

“I push so much harder when someone’s like, ‘no, you can’t do that,’ or ‘you’re too small,’” Brauer said. “It would be amazing if there was just one other girl that saw me and said ‘Oh, I can do that, too.’”

She came a long way from her roots on the South Fork that fostered her love of life on the water.

“My first boat was a kayak that I used to paddle to Springs Middle School in the mornings,” she told Wind Check magazine last year. “I started sailing very late, at 19 years old when I moved to Hawaii for college.”

Now she’s sailing a 40-foot Class40, a high-performance sailboat designed for racing single handedly. By the time she crossed the finish line, she said the boat was “deteriorating,” taking on water and had to be pumped out every few hours.

East End residents cheered the hometown hero setting a record in one of the region’s original industries.

“East Hampton Town residents are bursting with pride as we celebrate our very own Cole Brauer for making history,” town officials wrote in a Facebook post. “Thank you for inspiring us all on the East End and beyond.”

-With Associated Press