Don’t Tell Them They Can’t

Maiden a film by Frank Bough.  With Tracy Edwards, Pat Edwards, Jo Gooding, Nancy Harris.  *****

I’m not surprised that a group of women would form a crew to compete in the Whitbread Round the World Race.  I’m surprised that anyone would form such a crew.  I’m surprised that anyone would want to enter that race, or would succeed in it.

The footage in this movie is terrifying.  Forget all the goofball movies about terrible monsters and giant robots that are bringing about the end of the world.  There are no special effects in Maiden.  This is something people actually did (and filmed themselves, probably because no filmmaker would have been crazy enough to make the journey).  When you see the terrifyingly rough seas that were quite common on this journey that took some nine months; when you see women climbing masts that are hanging way over the ocean, while the ship moves through dreadfully rough seas; when you hear that they were doing this sometimes in temperatures of 20 below zero, so that somebody could only stay up on the mast for twenty minutes before they had to come down, because their bodies couldn’t take it anymore; when you realize that Tracy Edwards plotted that Southernmost journey through icier waters because she was trying to get some advantage to win, you understand that you’re dealing with an extraordinary group of people.  Except that they look completely ordinary.  They look like the girl next store.

This is one of the most literally thrilling movies I’ve ever watched.  I was spellbound the whole time, from the first view of those rough seas as the movie opened.

The story begins in pain and sorrow.  Tracy Edwards had a marvelous childhood, a wonderful father and mother who raised her in a happy household.  But when her father died of a heart attack when she was ten, her mother was unable to keep the family business together, and eventually—perhaps out of economic necessity—married a man who was extremely abusive to Tracy.  He beat her up and she fought back.  One of the women who was later on her crew knew her as a teenager, and confirms how violent and abusive Tracy’s stepfather was.  Eventually, feisty young woman that she was, she left home without finishing high school.  She wasn’t going to endure that treatment.

It amazes me that a fair amount of film footage survives from Tracy’s entire lifetime.  If I suddenly decided to lead a crew of old duffers around the world (must be a senior!) there would hardly be any footage of my life.  Tracy’s whole life seems to be on film.

She got jobs of various kinds, worked in bars and restaurants.  (There is even film footage of her boozing with her friends.)  Eventually she got a job as a cook on a luxury yacht, a job she seemed to love, because of the camaraderie of the crew, then managed cook on one of the sailboats that had entered the Whitbread Round the World Race.  It was unusual to have a woman on board, and though I’m as pro-woman as any man on earth, I can understand why you wouldn’t want an attractive young woman on a boat that had ten horny men sailing around the world for nine months.  But she did it.  She apparently loved it.  What galled her was the fact that they would only let her cook.  She decided that the only way she ever would ever be allowed to work topside is if she got together an all-female crew.

I have to say that, at that moment, and all through the movie—which moves at a rapid pace—I kept asking myself, how is Tracy qualified to do this?  How are any of these women qualified?  Apparently they all had sailing experience.  At least I hope they did.  But sailing around the world?  Navigating that journey?  Tracy was the navigator, and I have no idea where she learned that skill.  For most of the women of this journey, I got the feeling that their primary qualification was their sense of adventure.  They just wanted to do this thing.  They didn’t want someone telling them they couldn’t.

Finding a boat was a huge struggle, and they finally found a secondhand one that needed a lot of repair.  They did that work themselves.  They also needed a sponsor.  We’re talking millions of dollars here.  Nobody wanted to take a chance.  Finally, of all people, King Hussein of Jordan—who had met Tracy on the luxury yacht—supplied the money they needed.  They took off on this nine-month adventure, which included several legs, and some stops along the way.

It would be unfair to tell much more of the story.  Count me among the people who would have thought it enough just to compete in the race, just to finish it: I don’t mean because they were women.  The same goes for any male crew.  I think that the sheer courage to undertake such a thing, the physical difficulty of it (four hours on, four hours off, months at a time, no days off), the psychological difficulty, the obstacles they faced as women, including the skepticism of many men: all that is astounding.  At one point there was a leak in the hull because of the pounding the boat had been taking, and as one of the women said, (I’m paraphrasing), “It wasn’t as if we could call somebody to do the repair.  We had to do it.”  Way out on the ocean, no land in sight.  (They said, incidentally, that land has a smell.  They could smell it before they could see it.)

I’m a lover of documentaries, but this wasn’t on my list.  I’ve never been interested in sailing.  But it’s an absolute must-see, one of the most thrilling movies I’ve ever seen.

Twenty years later, a number of the women are still around to talk about it.