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‘Maiden’ Review: An Inspiring Voyage with an All-Female Yacht Racing Crew

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[ This is a re-post of my review from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Maiden opens today in limited release. ]

I’m a sucker for documentaries like Alex Holmes ’ Maiden . Give me a good story of competition in the face of adversity featuring likable people, and I’m pretty much on board. With Maiden , Holmes tells two, intertwined stories. One is about a crew of sailors trying to win a yacht race around the world in 1989 (although “yacht” tends to carry the connotation of wealth, these boats were simple sailing vessels powered by wind and currents). The other story is how this crew was comprised entirely of women, and no one thought that women could work together or handle the physical rigors of the competition. Led by skipper Tracy Edwards , Maiden shows how this crew overcame both social and environmental obstacles to prove the world wrong.

Although Maiden includes interviews with most of the crew of the Maiden, the ship led by Edwards, she is the true protagonist of the story. Fleeing from an abusive stepfather when she was a teenager, Edwards discovered a love of sailing and became enchanted with the idea of participating in the Whitbread Round the World Race. In the past, the closest she came to this kind of participation was as a cook, but she was determined to prove that she could sail as well as any man. Edwards then works her ass off to assemble a crew, find sponsorship, and set out to not just compete in the Whitbread, but to win the race.

What I love most about Maiden is that it’s not a hagiography of Edwards. It doesn’t try to hold her up as some impossible ideal that us mere mortals cannot hope to emulate. Instead, the film acknowledges and embraces her faults. The film notes that at times her crew was divided against her in the run-up to the competition or how she could have a short temper due to the enormous pressure of trying to put together sponsorship for the Maiden. Maiden recognizes that hard things are hard, and that while talent and opportunity is all well and good, a large part of achievement is the inglorious work behind the scenes. It’s nice to think that sailing around the world is all about adventure, but someone has to figure out how to get the boat and how to pay for everything. Edwards put it all on her shoulders, and her crew acknowledges that she worked herself to the bone to make this dream a reality.

If putting together a ship to race in the Whitbread wasn’t tough enough, Edwards and the crew of the Maiden also had to endure sexism from both their peers and the press. It may seem surprising today that not a single brand would want to sponsor the first all-women yacht racing team, but it’s less surprising when you consider the era. Furthermore, the press looked at the Maiden not as a team of competitors but as a novelty act that would likely drop out before they even finished the first leg of the journey. Although all the ways the sexism presented itself is unsurprising, it’s no less of a motivator for the crew of the Maiden.

Maiden is about as straightforward as a documentary can get. There are clear goals, there are clear obstacles, the good guys and the bad guys are clearly delineated, and you know that at the end this will be a story about the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity. But Holmes puts it all together so well that you don’t really mind the predictability. Not every documentary has to upend the genre or feature some shocking revelation. Sometimes it’s enough to just have incredible people tell their story.

I walked out of Maiden feeling like I too could do something incredible like sail around the world before remembering that I have no sailing experience and would likely die a horrible death in the heart of an angry, unforgiving sea. But watching what Edwards and her crew accomplished lets me live vicariously through their achievements and cheer them on. Maiden is the best kind of crowd-pleasing documentary and shows what competitions can be at their best when everyone gets a chance to compete.

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“What it takes to sail around the world is, first of all, you have to be a bit crazy,” a voice tells us at the beginning of Alex Holmes ’ moving documentary, “Maiden.” “You have to be different than the normal bloke.” Holmes’ subjects are certainly different than normal blokes in that they’re the first all-female competitors to enter a boat into the Whitbread Around the World Challenge. As with all firsts, the quest to be taken seriously is almost as insurmountable as the actual task at hand. And the Whitbread is no easy feat; it’s 33,000 nautical miles in total, most of which will be spent battling the Earth’s most plentiful and pissed off geographical resource, the ocean.

When we first see the boat that gives “Maiden” its title, she is both Webster’s definitions of scrappy: she’s in an advanced state of disrepair due to use, yet there’s a feistiness about her, an unwillingness to give up the ghost just yet. Though skipper Tracy Edwards chose Maiden for budgetary reasons, she and her crew set about to restore the ship to her former glory, then attempt to etch upon her an even greater victory. No woman had ever led a ship to win the Whitbread simply because no women skippers had been allowed to enter it. The best they could do was to serve as the vessel’s cook, a job Edwards held during the prior Whitbread. and even then, that idea was met with severe reservations and pushback.

As with all things that are considered “boys’ clubs,” the general consensus is that there’s no place for a woman. Either she’s a visual distraction, an unskilled weak link or both. Such generalizations are rarely based on evidence as any opportunity to disprove them is dismissed rather than granted by the powers that be. Edwards has no problem finding a crew of women who share her passion and skillset for sailing, proving that there’s a market and an interest her male counterparts refuse to acknowledge. Edwards’ bigger problem is finding someone to sponsor her entry into the Whitbread. Either the companies she solicits think the idea of an all-female competitor is outright foolishness, or they love the idea yet don’t think there will be a return on their investment. Thanks to an unusual benefactor, the Maiden enters the nine month race in September, 1989.

Edwards is the first face we see in “Maiden,” and the first voice we hear. “The ocean is always trying to kill you,” she narrates over a series of terrifying waves that would give even the Beach Boys pause. “It doesn’t take a break.” Edwards then appears before us in promotional footage taken just before the race in 1989. She is focused on introducing herself as the skipper of the Maiden. She is dark-haired, with a youthful spark in her eye that reeks of the piss and vinegar supposedly reserved solely for men in their prime. Like far too many women, she’s repeatedly told to smile.

When the current incarnation of Edwards appears soon after, it’s a bit jarring not because she’s clearly older, but because that same youthful spark is present, its intensity unblemished by the passage of time. We see this spark in all the women who are interviewed in the present day—the back and forth editing constantly swaps boat footage shot by Edwards’ childhood friend and crewmate, Jo Gooding in 1989 with Holmes’ present-day talking heads, as if the two versions of the Maiden crew are conversing across time. This method is not only effective, it’s inspiring. When the elder Edwards chokes up at one point over a memory we’ve just witnessed, we can’t help but be pulled into the same emotions.

Edwards is as rich a character as one would find in a great seafaring novel, though as English class informed us, those stories were predominantly if not entirely male. Her parents instilled an independence in her, her Mum’s unconventional interests serving as the influential stereotype busters that would eventually underscore Edwards’ determination to enter the Whitbread. After her entrepreneur father died when she was 10, Edwards bore witness to the first major instance of the patriarchy’s far-reaching effect on female independence when her mother was forced out of running the family speaker business by male competitors who did not want to risk losing face by being bested by a woman.

This macho fear of losing to women bleeds directly into the Whitbread, with skippers Bruno Dubois and Skip Novak (the latter commanding a rival English boat) expressing their thoughts in 1989 about the Maiden’s lack of strength and cohesion. As with everyone else, we see those two, as well as journalists Bob Fisher and Barry Pickthall, in the present as well. While the skippers’ comments could be seen as trash-talking, the journalists’ pens were far more vicious, brutal and harmful to Edwards and her crew. Pickthall and Fisher shaped the public narrative and their mockery was relentless. “I wasn’t as misogynistic as the other guy,” says one of the two journalists, but they both seem to still be amused by the mean things they churned out.

While “Maiden” is far more concerned with depicting the Maiden crew’s strengths and accomplishments, it can’t help but see male ego issues every time it looks to the horizon. Edwards and her crew are asked completely different questions than their male counterparts. With Novak and Dubois, the reporters talk shop. With Edwards, Gooding and company, the questions are about makeup, fashion, gossip and the possibility of catfights. Even after the Maiden exceeds expectations, it’s written up as pure luck; only failure yields skill-based discussions. Thirty years on, little has changed in this regard.

I won’t tell you if the Maiden wins or loses simply because I didn’t know myself. I don’t think documentaries have spoilers, but the message of this film lies in the influence of the Maiden’s voyage, not the outcome of the race. It’s not lost on the filmmakers that the ocean, with its overarching command of death, is the only equal-opportunity proponent in the Whitbread. It’s a bitter irony that tempers the sweet taste of victory. “Maiden” excels as a suspenseful sports tale and a record of a historic first, but its biggest strength is in its warts-and-all character study of the Maiden crew. One can’t help but feel seen, moved and empowered once the credits roll.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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'maiden': groundbreaking 1989 sailing race for all-female crew.

Kenneth Turan

A new documentary tells the story of the first all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Round the World sailing race in 1989. The crew was led by a 24-year-old and the boat was called Maiden.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Search the Fresh Air Archive

With an all-female crew, 'maiden' sailed around the world and into history.

The remarkable story of the first all-female crew to compete in an around-the world sailing race. In 1989, 26 year old skipper Tracy Edwards set out on what was an unthinkable journey for a woman - to sail the 33,000 mile Whitbread Around the World Race. Her story and that of her crew is told in the documentary 'Maiden.'

Tracy Edwards

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Dave Davies

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. In the 1980s, the world of open ocean sailboat racing was pretty much all male. That is, until our guest, Tracy Edwards, decided she'd assemble an all-female crew to enter the grueling and dangerous 33,000 mile Whitbread Round the World Race. As you'll hear, the idea was unthinkable to most of men in the world of yacht racing and the journalists who covered them. The remarkable story of Edwards and her crew is told in a new documentary directed by Alex Holmes titled "Maiden," which was also the name of the yacht she sailed in the race. The film opens in theaters tomorrow.

Tracy Edwards had an unhappy childhood after her father died and her mom remarried. She ran away from home as a teenager, made her way to Greece and fell in love with sailing. She wanted so badly to compete that she signed on as a cook for an all-male crew on a Round the World Race. Though she learned a lot about sailing, she had no luck getting on as a crew member. She talked about her story with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Tracy Edwards, welcome to FRESH AIR. So as I gather from the documentary, you decided you're never going to get accepted as a crew member on a Round the World Race. So you decided, well, you're just going to start your own. How did you pull that off?

TRACY EDWARDS: Yes. I did look at the world of sailing and thought I need to change the shape of this because I don't fit in here. And so, you know, my mom always told me, if you don't like the way the world looks, change it. So I thought, OK, I will. I thought the easiest way - (laughter) that makes me laugh - the easiest way to do that would just be to put an all-female crew together. And, you know, we'd just prove we can do it and everyone will accept it and everything will be fine.

But that was far from what happened. You know, we had so much obstruction and criticism and anger, which I found really quite strange. You know, why would you be angry that we want to sail around the world? It's - we're not putting you out. We're just doing our own thing.

So it's - it was a strange process. I started out putting an all-female crew together because, A, I wanted to prove that we could do it but also so that I could be the navigator, which was quite a selfish reason. And then as we went on with it and it - people thought it was so impossible. And I thought, well, I've just raced around the world. It's not that difficult.

DAVIES: Right. And, well, you had to figure out - well, you had to buy a boat. And I gather you had a house that you mortgaged - right? - and put up - and borrowed money. And then you and the women that you recruited worked on restoring this boat yourselves. And it needed a lot of work, right?

EDWARDS: Yes, it did. We got to the point where we'd been trying for so long to raise money, the sponsorship to design and build our own boat, which, of course, all the other crews were doing. And I just - I realized one day that that's not going to happen. There are times where you do have to admit failure and go in a different direction. This is one of those times.

And so we found an old secondhand racing yacht with a pedigree. And that was - she was called Prestige at the time, but before that, she'd been Disque D'Or 3 and had been designed and built for Pierre Fehlmann in the '81-'82 Whitbread Round the World Race where she hadn't actually done that well.

When we bought her in the summer of '88, I mean, she was in a terrible state. And we put her on a ship, and we brought her back to the U.K. And then I gave the girls sledgehammers, and I said, right, take her apart, and we did. I mean, we stripped the inside of the boat. We stripped the deck. We took the mast out. We took everything apart.

DAVIES: Yeah. Was it unusual for crew members to do the repairs on their own boat? Is that what the guys did?

EDWARDS: It was absolutely unique - completely unique. All these other guys had a shore team. They had - well, they had brand-new boats, so they didn't really need to do any work on them. And, you know, so they'd sit in the cafe and watch us as we were putting this boat together. Although, as I said, I mean, there was a very nice part of that sort of being part of this big Whitbread family is that if you did go and ask for help, you would 99.9% of the time you would get it. You know, you might get a bit of a snide, well, you know, if you need help kind of thing, but then, you know, we were - beggars can't be choosers.

But the great thing about doing what we did the way we did it was we learned everything we needed to know about the boat. We put every single item into that boat, onto that boat. We painted her. We put the rig in. We did the rigging. We did the electronics, the plumbing, the NAV station, the rigging. So when we put Maiden in the water, I would say that we, us as a crew, knew our boat better than any other team in the race.

DAVIES: Which would come in handy later on (laughter).

EDWARDS: Yeah.

DAVIES: You got the boat, and even if you fixed it up, you still needed a lot of money because this is a race that takes months, and you need shore crews to help. And so you needed a sponsor. And typically, corporations would sponsor crews. You couldn't get that and you got some help as the result of a kind of a chance association you'd made in the past. Tell us about this.

EDWARDS: Yeah (laughter). So - I know. There's bits of my life which are so surreal. I was a stewardess on a charter yacht in Newport, R.I., and we had a very secretive, very important, high-profile guest. And we didn't know who it was.

DAVIES: This is a couple years earlier, right? Yeah.

EDWARDS: This is in 1984. So in 1984, I was working as a stewardess on this charter yacht. We had a surprise guest. It was, you know, very - it was all a bit weird, actually. We thought it might be Ted Kennedy.

But anyway, so we went off to Martha's Vineyard. The whole boat was checked. You know, we had the Navy. We had sniffer dogs. We had divers. Then we weren't allowed to stay on the boat that night. We're like, who is this person? And it turned out to be King Hussein and Queen Noor, and they'd just been their - Prince Abdullah's graduation. And they came for day sailing.

And I was washing up after lunch, and I felt this sort of presence beside me, and I turned around and it was King Hussein. And he had a tea towel in his hand, and I said, I don't think you can do that. He said, I can do anything. I'm king.

DAVIES: (Laughter).

EDWARDS: I was like, OK. I mean, I didn't really know who he was, if I'm perfectly honest. I was 21 years old, hadn't read a newspaper since I'd left home. But there was something quite extraordinary about this man, and he was fascinated with what I did, and King Hussein was a people collector.

He - and it wasn't just me. I mean, he collected people from all over the world, all walks of life. He found people interesting, fascinating. He loved his fellow human being. And I think that's what made him such an extraordinary leader and why Jordan is such a place of stability in the Middle East today. And he encouraged me to do the '85-'86 race. And then when I was putting Maiden together, he was always there in the background, always on the end of a phone if I needed help or advice.

But when I got to the point where I thought I can't spend any more time looking for this money - you know, two years and we had bits and pieces of money and donations and stuff but no big sponsor - I called him up and I told him, and he went, oh, for goodness sake. He said, right. He said, Royal Jordanian Airlines is going to be your sponsor. And that was just brilliant. You know, we - just having not to struggle for money anymore was amazing. And then, of course, she ended up this beautiful gray color with the red and the gold stripe because that's the color of Royal Jordanian Airlines' planes.

DAVIES: I have to ask. He was always on the other end of a phone. How does one dial up a king? Do you get his cellphone number?

EDWARDS: Well, he left me his phone number before he left the boat, and then before I got home to the U.K., he'd called my mum. And when I - I did a transatlantic home, and I got to Lymington and, of course, we didn't have cellphones in those days, so I went to find a payphone. And I called my mother and she said, what have you been up to? I said, nothing. I have - we just got off the boat. I've sailed across the Atlantic. She said, some guy called King Hussein keeps calling, and...

EDWARDS: ...You know? I said, oh, God. Please don't tell me you said you were the Queen of Sheba and put the phone down. She said, no, because knowing you, I thought there was every likelihood that it would be, so, yeah. So we forged this...

DAVIES: Wow.

EDWARDS: ...Very strong and very close friendship. And if I ever, ever needed to speak to him, he would always get back to me or be on the end of a phone.

DAVIES: Tracy Edwards' remarkable experience as skipper of the first all-female crew to compete in an around-the-world sailing race is told in the new documentary "Maiden." It opens in theaters this Friday. We'll be back and talk some more after a quick break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAN AUERBACH'S "HEARTBROKEN, IN DISREPAIR")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Tracy Edwards. She assembled and led the first all-female sailing crew to compete in an around-the-world race in 1989. That's the subject of the new documentary "Maiden." It opens in theaters this Friday.

So you get the boat ready, and you start going out and sailing in runs. And there was actually a kind of a warm-up race to the round-the-world race. And there's some - there's a leadership struggle, in effect. I mean, you - your first mate, who was a very experienced sailor - you decide you have to let her go because there's a question of sort of who's really in charge of the boat. And it was kind of a tough thing. And it became a media story when you came back because it fed into the narrative of, oh, it's a catfight. These are squabbling women.

And I thought we'd just hear a - this is a scene from the film that's - where we hear a member of your crew, Jeni Mundy, talking about the kinds of questions that she and the crew and you got from the media. Let's listen.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MAIDEN")

JENI MUNDY: If you looked at the questions or the articles written about us at the time, they were always digging for stories on, well, who's boyfriend, girlfriend? Are you lesbians? Are you sleeping around? Or surely you're not getting on that well. Bunch of women on a boat that size - there must be a lot of squabbles.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: What about the crew? A bunch of girls - how'd you all get on?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Remarkably well.

MUNDY: You never saw them ask the guys those questions. They would be asked about tactics, challenges, you know, sail - sensible sporting questions. We almost never got asked those questions. Why?

DAVIES: And that's Jeni Mundy. She was on the crew of the Maiden. That was the ship that was skippered by our guest Tracy Edwards. You had the first all-female crew to compete in an around-the-world sailing race. That story is told in the new documentary "Maiden." Were you surprised at the media reaction that you got?

EDWARDS: We weren't surprised that there was resistance to an all-female crew in the race. You know, sailing is one of the last bastions of patriarchy, if you like. And it is entrenched. It's - you know, we're a maritime nation. It's entrenched in our history, in our warfare, in our culture. And it is extremely male-dominated. And it was, I would say, the hardest sport at - well, the hardest sport of any time to want to prove that women could do it, so I wasn't surprised there was resistance.

The thing that really made me laugh was the two things that guys used to say to us with absolute certainty. One was you're going to die, not you might or, you know, we think it's a bit of a risk. But, no, you're going to die, which - OK, we took that with a pinch of salt. And the other one, many says, women don't get on. Well, what? You're not a woman, and you're wrong. And, you know, it was (laughter) so weird.

DAVIES: Yeah. One of - one sailing journalist, Bob Fisher, called you a tin full of tarts.

EDWARDS: (Laughter) Well, Bob and I are now very good friends, you'll be pleased to hear. Bob was one of the very few journalists who allowed us to change his mind. And for the documentary, I have to say, he did a wonderful job of being very honest about what he thought then. You know, and he could have ducked it, but he didn't. He really - he stepped up to the plate. But when we sailed into New Zealand in first place, Bob Fisher then wrote in Yachts & Yachting, not just a tin full of tarts - a tin full of smart, fast tarts.

EDWARDS: And we all thought this was great. You know, oh, yay. Bob's changed his mind. And then someone said to us, you do know that tart is still in that sentence, you know? We were like, oh, yeah. OK. Well, maybe a little bit further to go.

DAVIES: You know, one of the things that struck me as I looked at the film - there's a lot of clips of you doing media interviews. And I have to say you seem very composed and on-message. I mean, you don't - you know, you don't rail at people. You don't rage at the criticism that you have been given. Did you get advice on this? Did it just come naturally?

EDWARDS: That is such a good question. You know, the first thing I thought when I first watched this documentary with all the other women - and we all said to - almost - a woman, the same thing. I looked at myself on that screen, and I thought, well, that's not me. That's - no, no. I have no link with that person - this young person up on the screen because I remember myself as being a bit of an idiot and a bit of a twit, really.

And I have this sort of almost horrible reoccurring dream about me being - oh, just kind of lurching from one situation to the next and, you know, fighting the next obstacle. And then we watched that, and I thought, I actually sound quite sensible in some of the interviews. And, you know, I say a couple of quite profound things. And to me, I don't remember myself like that.

And the only thing I can think - and I didn't have any major training. The only thing I can think is - I mean, my mom and Admiral Charles Williams, who was the organizer of the Whitbread, who was a huge supporter of Maiden. He was so wonderful. Admiral Charles Williams - yes, of course women can sail around the world.

EDWARDS: He was just wonderful. He did take me aside a couple of times and say, you know, yeah, you can't do a press announcement and then run out of the room. You know, you do have to stay for questions and little tips like that. But I was told right from Day 1, don't lose your temper. Because I, at the time, did have just a little bit of a temper, I have to say. So I am amazed when I watch that footage because I think I probably know what's going on beneath the surface.

DAVIES: And there's one moment which, I'm told, you cringe when you see now where you're asked, are you a feminist? And you say, I hate that word.

DAVIES: What was - I could kind of get what you were saying, but you tell me.

EDWARDS: Yeah. Well, you know, in the '80s, feminist was an accusation. It wasn't a nice title. It was - it had all sorts of horrible connotations. And really, it had been made into a word that women should be ashamed of, I think, with deliberate reason. And, you know, I drank the Kool-Aid, basically. And I was very young. I was 23, 24, during that interview. And I didn't want people not to like me. You know? You care very much at that age that people like you. I mean, you may be annoying them and putting this whole female crew together.

But I do remember afterwards my mum said to me, I'm so surprised that you don't think you're a feminist. And she said, I'm not going to tell you what you should say, but I think you need to have a bit of a think about that one. And then when we again got to New Zealand, and we won that leg and we were getting the same stupid, crass, banal questions that we had on every other leg, I just thought, you know what? I think this is bigger than us and bigger than Maiden and bigger than anything we've been tackling. This is about equality. And I think I am a huge, fat feminist. I think I absolutely am.

And I stood up for the first time in my life, and I said something that might hurt me and might make me not likeable. And I took pride in it, and it was an extraordinary experience.

DAVIES: When you were working as a cook on the otherwise all-male crew of that Round The World Race back then, when you observed the men on the boat and how they interacted with one another, I'm wondering if that was different from your observations of all-women crews that you saw later on?

EDWARDS: It's very smelly. It's very messy. You know, there's a lot of swearing. And then there are days when guys don't talk to each other. What is that? So that was very weird - a lot of tension, testosterone, egos. I mean, it was an interesting experience, that nine months. You know, first time and last time I'd ever been, you know, with 17 men and sort of watching them in their environments, if you like. You know, their natural habitat (laughter).

So it was - I had nothing to compare it to at that time, but then doing an all-female crew, then I noticed, wow, there's a huge difference between a group of women and a group of men.

DAVIES: Right. And how would you describe the difference?

EDWARDS: Well, I prefer sailing around the world with an all-female crew. I prefer, you know, sailing with women, anyway - much cleaner, you know? We do tend to wash.

EDWARDS: You know, even if it was in cold saltwater. (Laughter). More use of deodorant, as well, I have noticed. But we were always chatting, always talking. I mean, I know women - I know people say women talk a lot. We really did. And we did talk the whole way around the world. I don't think there's one subject that we didn't cover in depth, inside, outside and backwards.

Women are kinder to each other, and in a much more obvious way. So, you know, we - well, we're naturally more nurturing and caring, I think. And if you saw someone scared, or worried, or anxious or a bit down, there'd always be someone, you know, that would put their arm around your shoulder and go, cup of tea? Yes, please. Thank you very much.

So just a completely, completely different atmosphere - and I do think that each flourish in their own atmosphere. You see, that's the thing. I have done mixed crews, which have worked really, really well. But I think at that time, it really was each to their own.

DAVIES: Right. The thing that I wondered was whether women are just simply more willing to cooperate. And a crew really has to work together on a long voyage like that.

EDWARDS: I think the one time when we didn't talk was the time when we were cooperating the most, which was on the start lines. And it was very interesting, actually. We didn't notice we did this at all because we trained a lot. We trained. We trained. We trained. And then when we were on the start line - on the start line, you've got a lot of screaming and shouting. There's a lot of very macho posturing, you know, between the boats. And it's all sort of playing chicken, and it's, (laughter), there's a lot of shouting.

DAVIES: 'Cause you're all close together there. Right.

EDWARDS: Because you're all close together. But what we didn't realize until we got to the next stop, one of the guys said, you girls not talking to each other on the start line then? You know, you're not talking to each other already? And we went, yeah. What do you mean? He said, well, no one was saying anything or shouting anything. I said, well, we don't like being shouted at so therefore we tend not to shout at each other (laughter). And then we realized, when we're sailing in those quite stressful conditions, we were completely silent because we were so in harmony with each other.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview Dave Davies recorded with Tracy Edwards. In 1989, she became the first woman to lead an all-female sailing crew on the Whitbread Round the World Race. That voyage is the subject of the new documentary "Maiden."

After a break, we'll talk about the dangers and the extremes the crew faced during the race. And Justin Chang will review the new movie "Yesterday," whose conceit is that a strange blip has erased The Beatles from history with the exception of one singer-songwriter who remembers the band and their songs. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Tracy Edwards, who in 1989 was the first woman to lead an all-female sailing crew on the Whitbread round the World Race.

It was an arduous 33,000-mile competition divided into five legs. The boats would start in England and compete to arrive first in the designated ports, where the winning crew would win a trophy and the crews would rest a few days before starting the next leg. The best cumulative time for the whole race was named the winner. Edwards' story is told in the new documentary "Maiden," directed by Alex Holmes. It opens in theaters tomorrow.

DAVIES: This first leg of the journey from England to Uruguay, you finished third out of the four boats in your class. And the journalists who thought you wouldn't even get there were giving you a well done sort of treatment. You didn't feel that way, right?

EDWARDS: No. We were absolutely gutted when we came third. We were so disappointed. So we had this really weird situation going on on the dock. So we were coming in with a face as low as I don't know what and then everyone else on the dock was going, you're alive, you're alive. So we had this really strange party with a very happy group of people and a very grumpy group of (laughter). It was very weird.

DAVIES: The second leg of the journey is from Uruguay to Australia. It's the longest. And you're kind of sailing across the bottom of the world if you kind of turn the globe over and picture it. So the most direct route would be kind of as close to the South Pole as possible. That gets tricky. That imposed a tough decision on you. Tell us what, you know, the trade-offs were and the challenges.

EDWARDS: Well, you don't just stop in ports. You continue to work and the girls are fixing the boat and themselves. And I just either sat in my room in the hotel with all my charts and everything else or on the boat in the nav station. And you're planning your next leg, and you're looking at different things, like what does the weather look like that's coming up? What is the sea state currently in the Southern Ocean? Where are the icebergs? They were particularly far north that year. And you're looking at long-range forecasts and trying to piece all these things together. And so what you want to do is, yes, you want to go as far south as possible but - and the reason why others made the decision not to was because of the icebergs.

Now, I made quite a risky decision that we wouldn't hit an iceberg. And I took us the furthest south of any boats in the Whitbread fleet that year. But I was very clear on what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it. What you don't want to do is go so far south that you go over the Antarctic shelf, which then changes the shape of the waves and can make them quite unmanageable. And you also don't want to get on the wrong side of the low pressures, which is to go south of them. You want to stay north of them because they travel clockwise. So it was a hugely fraught leg on the decision-making front, but I was probably the clearest I'd ever been about anything in the race, and I got it right.

DAVIES: OK. So this crew - this is not a balmy Caribbean sail. I mean, you're going to save time, but conditions are - well, I think one of you said there's nothing that can prepare you for sailing in the Southern Ocean. Can you just describe a little bit about what it was like, what the crew had to put up with?

EDWARDS: OK. So the conditions in the Southern Ocean is your body starts to deteriorate as soon as you cross the start line. Pain and cold are the quickest ways to lose weight. You can get frostbite in your fingers and toes. It's minus 20, minus 30 degrees below freezing. You are constantly damp because salt water doesn't dry. So the girls up on deck would be miserable, cold, wet, miserable, you know, freezing fingers and toes, tons of clothing on, so you can barely move.

The food's revolting, so you just shovel it down your throat as quickly as possible and try and get as much sleep as possible with this four on, four off watch system. And it's also a sensory deprivation. There's no sun. There's no blue sky. It's gray, and the boat's gray, and everything's gray. And it is a miserable leg.

DAVIES: And you have to look out for ice, and sometimes it's foggy, and sometimes it's at night. What - do you place someone on the bow? How does that work?

EDWARDS: Yep. So you have a bow watch. We realized when we had woken up - well, when I'd woken up and the girls were really staring at it, but I was - I went up on deck and we were sailing past an iceberg. And I said, oh, my God, I didn't see that on the radar, and they went, nope, we didn't either. So that's when we thought, yeah, we need to have someone up on the bow just because it just gives you that few seconds more of warning if you see an iceberg and you have to swerve.

DAVIES: Right. So you're not within sight of any of the other boats, obviously. And you finally get to the calmer waters as you approach Australia. Describe getting into Australia and realizing where you were.

EDWARDS: Well, coming out towards Australia, a number of things happen when you come out of the Southern Ocean. A, well, obviously, it gets warmer as you're heading up towards Australia. The sea state changes. The color of the sea goes from a black to this beautiful, deep, translucent blue. The sky - you can see the sky again. It actually has a definition between the - you know, between the sea and, you know, the clouds. You suddenly remember all these things that you haven't seen for five weeks.

And then obviously, as I said, it gets warmer. You start to dry everything out. And as you get closer to land, as Jeni says in the film, land smells. And, you know, for quite a way out, you can smell what's coming up, and that's quite amazing. And it is like being reborn. And as we came up to Australia, we did not know whether we had won. We suspected we were in first place, but we didn't know until we crossed the finishing line and Howard was on one of the boats shouting, you're first. And we just were - that was I think probably the happiest moment in my entire life.

DAVIES: The third leg is the shortest. It goes from Australia to New Zealand, and that's a different kind of sailing. It's sort of tactical. You're often within sight of the other boats. You win again. Describe arriving in New Zealand.

EDWARDS: Oh, it was just amazing. We knew we had to win this leg to prove that we could do a long, hard leg and a short, complicated leg. And I had three great tacticians on board, and we did match race pretty much the whole way there with L'Esprit (ph) and then with Rucanor. And when we got into New Zealand, we'd been delayed by the wind dropping, and it was nighttime, so we got - we actually ended up getting in at 1 o'clock in the morning. And it wasn't again until we crossed the start - the finishing line that someone said, you know, you've won, and we were so happy. It was only by an hour this time whereas the previous time, it'd been 36 hours.

So we were now 16 hours ahead of our nearest rival at the halfway point. And when we did turn the corner to motor into the port that we were going into, there was a wharf and we thought that it was covered with thousands of birds. And it was only when we got closer that we realized it was people. Thousands and thousands of people had come out in Auckland at 1 o'clock in the morning to see Maiden in. And it was - oh, it was just amazing.

DAVIES: So you were - you had become famous. I mean, I guess this was, in some respects, kind of a novelty story in some way. But suddenly, people are rooting for you, and you're winning.

EDWARDS: It was - yeah. I mean, I think we still stayed a novelty for some people, although for a lot of people, they started to wake up and go, wow. Actually, women can do this.

(SOUNDBITE OF LULLATONE'S "ALL THE OPTIMISM OF EARLY JANUARY")

The fourth leg of the race began not so well for you and the others on the Maiden. You had calm waters that prevented you from really getting a good start. And I thought we'd play a clip that describes the part where you were going around - I guess it's the Falkland Islands and some of the seas that you met. In this clip, we'll hear from members of the crew - Claire Warren, Dawn Riley, Jeni Mundy - and the clip begins with our guest, Tracy Edwards. Let's listen.

EDWARDS: We went 'round Cape Horn. And then there was, you know, the possibility of some options opening up for us to be able to pick up some ground, so I decided to go for it. Turning up and going up past the Falklands, it got a bit busy.

DAWN RILEY: There's only been a few times in my life that it had been that rough.

CLAIRE WARREN: Often, on a boat, you know, you'll find the shortest distance is straight into the wind, for example. Well, boats don't sail into the wind, so how far off do you go?

MUNDY: It's like hitting a brick wall in a car without your seatbelt on every 10 seconds. It's just relentless.

EDWARDS: There's a lot of slamming. Whoomp (ph), bam. Whoomp, bam - takes a lot out of the boat.

DAVIES: And that's from the new documentary "Maiden," which features the voyage led by Tracy Edwards, our guest. It was the first all-female sailing crew to compete in an around-the-world race in 1989. It is powerful watching those scenes of, essentially, sort of surfing down one side of a wave and then slamming into another. How dicey did this get? How did the boat take it?

EDWARDS: It was an all-or-nothing decision. It was - you know, it could have been the wrong one, but we just had to do something, and so we all decided to go for it. What it did do was it opened up four hairline fractures in the mast, which we couldn't see at that time and didn't know they were there. But I - so I was in the nav station one evening, and I suddenly found water around my feet. And as we were going past the Falkland Islands, we had to - we started taking on a lot of water, and I mean a lot of water. It was pouring in.

We spent two days trying to find out where this water was coming in, and we hove to, which means you come off a way of the wind and you calm things down a bit, you take a couple of sails down. And the RAF Hercules was scrambled from the Falkland Islands just to check where we were in case we needed to be rescued.

DAVIES: That's an airplane dispatched from - by the British and the Falklands, right?

EDWARDS: That's exactly - so, yeah, after about two days, we managed to get rid of most of the water. And we realized that it was worse leaning over one side than it was leaning over the other side. And we managed to get on our way, but that lost us so much time. There was no way we could catch up on our lead at that point.

DAVIES: Yeah. I mean, this problem appeared with water at your feet in the navigation station, right? Did the fact that you and your crew had effectively kind of built the boat over again inside out - did that matter in diagnosing the problem and resolving it?

EDWARDS: Oh, without a doubt. If we hadn't rebuilt that boat, we wouldn't have known where to start. And as Jeni so eloquently puts in the film - it's one of my favorite lines when she says, you know, you can't, then, just give up and call the repair people. There are no repair people. I just love that so much. And, of course, you know, I mean, Jeni knew every inch of the boat. She was the electrician, and she'd run every cable. And we'd all done our separate areas, so we felt - OK, it was worrying, but we felt very confident that we were sorted out and we would get to the next stop over.

DAVIES: The last two legs, you didn't do as well as you had in the previous two and ended up finishing second in your class out of four - right? - when you sailed to England. Is that right?

EDWARDS: Yes.

DAVIES: Pretty good showing, you know, considering what people were expecting. As you arrived, you weren't feeling that, right?

EDWARDS: No. I mean, we came second in our class overall, which is the best result for a British boat since 1977 and actually hasn't been beaten yet. But that didn't mean much to us at the time. We were going through - when you finish a race like that, you go through a mixture of emotions. Obviously, if you're winning, it's all happiness and wonderful and fantastic. We hadn't won. We've come second, and it took me a long time to come to terms with that because second is nowhere in racing. But as Claire says in the film - you know, and she's very right - there was a bigger picture, and the bigger picture was what we had achieved.

The other thing, I think, that happens to you as you finish a race of that length is you suddenly realize that this family of people that you have been with for three years is suddenly going to disappear. And that is - it's quite shocking and can be depressing.

DAVIES: Right. That's three years total, I guess - what? - nine months or so on the ocean, pretty much.

DAVIES: Right. When you arrived in England, when you're sailing in, you knew that you weren't going to be there first. You did get a reception of sorts. You want to describe this?

EDWARDS: Well, it was quite - just extraordinary. We finished on Bank Holiday Monday, which - a good day to finish. And as we were coming up towards the needles, which we hadn't seen for nine months, it was sunrise. There wasn't really that much wind, and we were so close to - you know, this is it - the final stretch.

And as we were going up Southampton Water, hundreds of boats came out to meet us. And they would come towards us, turn around, then start sailing with us. So the final two hours of the boat was two hours I will never forget as long as I live - surrounded by thousands of people on hundreds of boats, throwing flowers and cheering. And it was absolutely amazing.

And crossing the finishing line, we knew, OK, we hadn't won, but we had sailed into the history books. And we are first, and you can't beat being first to do something. So - and then coming into Ocean Village, where 50,000 people were waiting for us, was just phenomenal - most amazing, extraordinary experience.

DAVIES: You know, we wouldn't have this documentary if there weren't a lot of film taken - or video, I guess - taken on the boat itself. This is real footage done on the voyage in 1989. How did that happen?

EDWARDS: Well, the Whitbread's organizers wanted some of the boats to take cameras, and most of the guys' boats were far too important and busy to take cameras and film. So you know, we stuck our hands up and said, we'll film. And so they gave us a camera.

And then we said, oh, who's - who is going to film? And Jo, who was the cook and my school friend - she said, well, I'd love to film. I'm doing - I'm the cooking. I'm - you know, I don't do a watch. So we packed her off to the BBC with a camera for four days. Four days - I mean, just extraordinary. And then she came back to the boat.

And, you know, we practiced before we went, which, again, is something the guys' boats didn't really do, even if they had cameras. We worked out that we needed a camera fixed on the radar mast for emergency situations when Jo couldn't film because we needed her on the deck as a crew member. And Jo has an amazing emotional intelligence. And her connection with her subjects, which is us, is what makes this whole film so completely unique. And Alex says, without her footage, he wouldn't have been able to make the documentary he made.

DAVIES: When the Maiden arrived back in England, you were named yachtsman of the year - still yachtsman, not...

DAVIES: Yeah. You were named yachtsman of the year - quite an honor. And you were a national celebrity - I mean, at age - what? - 27. What were your plans from that? I mean, you accomplished this remarkable thing.

EDWARDS: Well, I didn't have any plans, and that's unfortunately - did not go well. So the girls will disappear quite quickly. They'd been made job offers. And I said, rather gallantly and stupidly, I will - I'll stay here, and I'll write the book. And I'll do the interviews, and I'll, you know, sort of keep the story going.

And I fell off a cliff, really. And within, I would have to say - how long? - within nine months of the race finishing, I'd had a nervous breakdown. And if you'd have asked me this question even two years ago, I would not have told you that. But we're talking a lot about mental health in the U.K. and about well-being and caring for ourselves.

And I didn't ask for help, and I was struggling badly without my teammates around me. And so I disappeared off down to Wales, and I stayed there for two years and really became a recluse to - really, to the point where the whole saying, well, wonder where the hell I'd gone - before reappearing in 1994 with a new sailing project.

DAVIES: Right. I'm curious how you look back on that crisis. I mean, it - as I hear the story - I mean, you'd gone a long time without a real family, and then you found it with this crew. And then, suddenly, they were gone.

EDWARDS: It was very hard saying goodbye to everyone. And I still get emotional when I talk about it today, really. It was a time when I - I mean, I - my lesson that I learned from that was really to ask help when - ask for help when you need it. And you know, there's nothing big about pretending to be brave. That's just stupid.

So the lesson I learned on the race was that friendship and teamwork are the two most important things. And the thing I learned after the race was, if you have that teamwork and that friendship, ask for help (laughter).

DAVIES: Well, it's been great talking to you. Tracy Edwards, thanks so much.

EDWARDS: Thank you.

GROSS: Tracy Edwards spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies. Edwards and her all-women crew that competed in the 1989 Whitbread Round The World Race are the subject of the new documentary "Maiden," which opens in theaters tomorrow.

After we take a short break, Justin Chang will review the new movie "Yesterday" that imagines a world in which the Beatles were erased from cultural memory, with the exception of one aspiring singer-songwriter who starts performing Beatles songs. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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The captain of the Maiden talks about how her all-female yachting crew made history

Director Alex Holmes and Tracy Edwards from the film "Maiden" pose for a portrait at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on June 13, 2019, in Los Angeles, Calif.

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Thirty years ago, Tracy Edwards and her female crew made history when they entered the male-dominated world of the Whitbread Round the World yacht race with their boat, the Maiden.

The captain and her crew were given the cold shoulder by the other participants. Nobody thought they would finish the first leg of the 32,000-mile race, let alone complete the grueling competition. But they won two legs of the contest — and the admiration of the world — with their accomplishment, which inspired other young women to follow their dream.

Edwards, now 56, was the first woman to receive the Yachtsman of the Year Award by the Yachting Journalists’ Association, in 1990, and was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

And now Edwards is front and center in the recently opened documentary “Maiden.” Directed by Alex Holmes, the documentary features contemporary interviews with Edwards and her crew — along with some of their male competitors — mixed with archival footage from the race and home movies of her early life in Pangbourne, England.

Edwards lived in a home with an abusive alcoholic stepfather and was openly rebellious as a teenager. She dropped out of school at 16 and worked as a cook and stewardess on ships at island resorts. Through sheer determination, she landed a job as a cook in 1985 on the Atlantic Privateer, one of the yachts in that year’s Whitbread Race.

Tired of the sexism she encountered on that yacht, Edwards decided to get together a crew and obtain a boat. When she couldn’t get a sponsor from England, King Hussein I of Jordan came forward and, through Royal Jordanian Airlines, sponsored her in the 1989 race.

Edwards continued in competitive sailing until 2005; now she’s a motivational speaker focusing on empowering young women.

During a recent visit to Los Angeles, Edwards and Holmes talked about the voyage of the Maiden and the movie.

Are there are a lot of female crews racing boats in England since your success with the Maiden 30 years ago.

Tracy Edwards : There have been other all-female crews, but unfortunately, they were put together by men who happened to have a spare boat. So, it’s like, ‘Here girls, do you want this spare boat with a bit of money and a secondhand kit and then you can race around the world?’ None of the all-female crews have ever done as well as we did.

Alex, you were inspired to make “Maiden” after you heard Tracy speak to your 11-year-old daughter’s class in 2014.

Alex Holmes : The reason I felt I had to make the film was because I was listening to Tracy tell the story and realizing that although Tracy was talking about all the obstacles she had to overcome, many of those barriers would still be in place for my daughter to dismantle. It just struck me that there’s a superficial sense of moving forward, but actually we never really made progress. We never really embraced the idea that there can be an equality of opportunity.

You originally had envisioned “Maiden” as a narrative feature.

AH: I had no expectations that there would be footage of this, so, of course, I imagined it unfolding as a narrative feature. This was before the era of the iPhone. It was only when Tracy said, we did have cameras on board, that the possibility [for a documentary] presented itself.

TE : The Royal Naval Sailing Association, which was our race committee, had this quite revolutionary idea to film stuff. It was all very exciting. All the other boats were going “No, no no — we’re too busy racing; we’re too serious to take cameras on board.”

We said, “We’ll take them.” We did feel that we wanted to, whatever happened, capture this for posterity. I think we were probably the only boat with two cameras because Jo, as the cook, said, “I am not doing the watch, so I’ll do the filming.” And we put a camera on the mast as well. If you heard “All hands on deck,” the job of the last person out was to hit the panic button and that would start the filming. So that’s how we got footage in extreme conditions.

Joanna Gooding, who was the cook and cameraperson, really captured the thrill, the grind and the danger you and crew went through during the voyage .

AH : Jo had this knack of just letting the camera linger and just watching people. She did this sort of portraiture, and she has this emotional intelligence, this sensitivity that meant you could really get a sense of what people on the boat were feeling and experiencing.

Some of the vintage footage in the film shows the male sailors dissing the crew of the Maiden, predicting they wouldn’t even make it through the first leg of the race. And we see them today discussing their behavior and how they feel today about Tracy and her crew’s accomplishment.

TE: They did tell the truth.

AH : The great thing with the way we were interviewing people is that we didn’t have to hurry. Eventually people stopped bothering to make things up. If it’s a 10-minute interview, then you can keep up a front and you can defer. If you let the interview run long enough, then people just stop being able to dissemble and they start telling you what they really think.

Tracy, I was shocked when journalist Bob Fisher called you and the Maiden crew a tin full of tarts.

TE: The greatest thing about Bob Fisher is that he was pretty much the only journalist who allowed us to change his mind. When we sailed into New Zealand in first place, he was the one who wrote in Yachts and Yachting that they are not just a tin full of tarts; they’re a tin full of smart, fast tarts — which we thought was great. That just shows the sign of the times that we didn’t go, “Will you stop using the word tarts.”

But anyway, Bob has grown, and the reason I find it so brilliant is that he allowed himself to be taken back and told the truth.

Tracy, how did you get involved in empowering girls to get their education?

TE : I probably retired from sailing, and ended up getting a real job, a 9-to-5 job, which I’d never had before. It was working with the police and child protection center, which I absolutely loved. It was amazing.

Up until then I’d been ambassadors to very big charities. I was a talking head — do something and then walk away. So I relinquished most of my charity stuff. I started to look at small charities because now I was in the country. I was invited to become patron of the Girls’ Network. They mentor girls. They get them to stay in school. I started looking at girls education and then started finding out that more than 130 million girls don’t have an education.

I ended up working with a number of girls educational charities and started learning that so much keeps girls out of education. And then Maiden made another appearance and my life went off in a different direction.

Maiden was about to be scuttled in the Seychelles. But thanks to King Hussein’s daughter, you were able to salvage her.

TE: She funded shipping it back [to England], and now Maiden’s sailing around the world again. It will be in San Francisco in August. We have an all-female crew. We have two kind of apprentices. We take young women who need miles so they can get onto the big boats and then we have two paying-guests places to raise money for charity.

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Susan King is a former entertainment writer at the Los Angeles Times who specialized in Classic Hollywood stories. She also wrote about independent, foreign and studio movies and occasionally TV and theater stories. Born in East Orange, N.J., she received her master’s degree in film history and criticism at USC. She worked for 10 years at the L.A. Herald Examiner and came to work at The Times in January 1990. She left in 2016.

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‘Maiden’: The tense story of seawomen who braved the waves and the cynics

Documentary recalls the first time an all-female crew competed in a round-the-world yacht race..

Tracy Edwards (center) steers her yacht during the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Race, the subject of the documentary “Maiden.”

Sony Pictures Classics

“I hate the word feminist,” British sailor Tracy Edwards told the TV cameras before embarking on a round-the-world race with the first-ever all-woman crew in 1989. “I [just] like to be allowed to do what I want to do.”

Four years earlier, she had begged her way onto a South African yacht as the cook.

“I never wanted anything in my life as much as to fit in with those guys,” she recalls in the new documentary “Maiden.” Instead, “I was treated like a servant” at the boys club.

If she couldn’t join them, she decided, she would have to beat them. As she scrambled to raise sponsorship money and restore a secondhand yacht, rechristened Maiden, the press pooh-poohed her efforts. And when her crew surpassed expectations in the opening legs of the Whitbread Round the World Race, condescension grew to outright hostility. One reporter called the boat “a tinful of tarts.”

“What the aggression against Maiden did was made me realize maybe I actually am a feminist,” she says. “I’d begun a fight I didn’t realizing I was having.”

Tracy Edwards on the Maiden in 1989.

Thirty years later, as soccer fans everywhere applaud the women in the World Cup, “Maiden” celebrates the defiant spirit of all the female athletes who have challenged the sporting world’s entrenched sexism.

It’s also a flat-out good yarn. With plenty of archival footage to go with the usual talking-head interviews, director Alex Holmes (“Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story”) takes a straightforward chronological approach, and it works beautifully because the facts fit neatly into the familiar three-act structure of fictional films, with setbacks, triumphs and a climax that isn’t quite what you expect but delivers an emotional payoff.

The dramatic tension is very real.

“The ocean’s always trying to kill you. It doesn’t take a break,” says Edwards, who made a risky shortcut along the coast of Antarctica to beat the other boats in Maiden’s class from Uruguay to New Zealand.

Some of the all-female crew aboard the Maiden.

During the next leg of the race, however, the yacht took on water and the crew lost 18 hours on the way to Fort Lauderdale. Dreading the I-told-you-so’s awaiting them on the docks, she had the women dress in bathing suits as a distraction.

“In hindsight, we really didn’t think that through enough,” Edwards says.

Maybe, but in the end, she won the respect of her critics and the ironic title of Britain’s Yachtsman of the Year.

Meanwhile, Maiden’s voyage continues, marking the race’s 30th anniversary with a victory lap around the globe. The yacht’s latest crew sailed into Honolulu this week.

‘Maiden’: The must-see documentary about women who “rocked the boat”

Post author By Megan Hobson
Post date 7 April, 2022

The documentary Maiden captures the story of yacht skipper Tracey Edwards and her female crew that dared to face a storm of sexism and make the world’s ocean their stage.

This inspirational film, produced by New Black Films and available on Netflix, transports viewers to 1989 using original footage taken on board the yacht “Maiden” and media coverage of the Whitbread Round the World Race.

Many of the challenges for these sportswomen coupled with gender equality discussions, subtly invite the viewer to question whether much has really changed since the 80s.

The 2018 documentary directed by Alex Holmes begins with a deep dive into Tracey Edwards’ early childhood, using home movies of her family overlaid with Edwards’ direct and reflective commentary. At age 10, following her father’s sudden death, Edwards’ idyllic childhood crashes around her.

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Her mother, a former rally car driver, dancer and go-kart racer, under pressure from the industry is forced to sell the family’s hi-fi business. This moment in Edwards’ life exposes her to the harsh realities for women who are working in what was considered a male-dominated industry.

Holmes continues this foreshadowing, exploring Edwards’ anger fuelled teenage years, exacerbated by her abusive stepfather, and her experience running away to Greece working on charter boats.

These early experiences of frustration and loneliness, alongside her passion for freedom, adventure and belonging, create a powerful foundation as the documentary unravels Edwards’ life and imperfect personality.

The film quickly gains momentum after Tracey secures a position as a cook onboard one of the British racing yachts. She describes begging the skippers at the dock to take her on and facing rejection, they didn’t want a female on board because “girls are for screwing when you get into port.”

Out of 230 crew members, Edwards became one of four women in the race. Media footage of Edwards’ discussing her responsibilities harshly juxtaposes the race montage of men working manual winches, yachts crashing through waves and interviews with fired-up commentators and skippers, all to an 80’s electronic dance soundtrack.

Edwards’ reflections have a melancholy edge, such as describing the time her male crewmates wrote “for sale, one case of beer,” on the back of her underwear. However, her determination shines in her memories of being out in the open water and her desire to ‘fit in’ with the chauvinistic sailing fraternity around her.

After the race, Edwards was determined to gather an all-female crew. Even in this plight, she was plagued by the sexist attitudes of the sport with no sponsorship support. In an ode to the huge risks many women must take to participate in male-dominated industries and sports, Edwards remortgages her house. Her future is on the line.

The film then takes her story up a notch, introducing interviews with Edwards’ crew as they race around the world over nine months.

Conditions on board the yacht reflect the endurance and perseverance of these sportsmen and women, working in four-hour shifts in temperatures down to -20 degrees, strapped to the boat in fear of being thrown overboard, sailing between icebergs in fog with skin flaking off their faces. Not all competitors make it to port alive.

The extreme conditions of the open-water show all teams no mercy, and no partiality to gender. Yet onshore, the “Maiden” crew are doubted by critics and the media based on their sex, a narrative that undermines the success and tenacity of many pioneering women reported on today.

Perpetuating the belief that the “Maiden” would not finish the first leg, that any victory was down to luck, Bob Fisher from the Guardian described the “Maiden” as a “tin full of tarts.” And while the journalists reflect on how their views have changed since then, questions prying into women’s relationships and sexuality and digging for a story about female “squabbling” are still evident in contemporary discourse.

“The things that used to get talked about, the expectation of how we’d be, that we’d be a bunch of bitches or we’d be, you know, pulling each other’s hair out and arguing all the time, just wasn’t a true reflection at all.

“Actually, we were a great team,” says Jane Goodes, the childhood friend of Edwards and the Maiden’s cook.

With disinterest in the crew’s skills, expectations for the Maiden to fail, and an eagerness to paint the team as a “sideshow” from the main race, the media’s pressure grows throughout the documentary.

Holmes also includes a controversial moment for the Maiden crew, especially as their story was shaping them into feminist trailblazers.

“Gripped by fear” of the media fallout if they failed, the crew agrees to wear their swimsuits as they cross the finish line on one of the legs.

This picture became the most syndicated sports photograph of the year. A distinct contrast to the hundreds of boats sailing beside the Maiden as they cross the final finish line to the cheers of thousands, arguably, the most inspiring image from the documentary.

While the film could focus entirely on Edwards’ adventurous and courageous spirit, Holmes incorporates an important underlying message throughout the documentary.

Tracey Edwards was not a perfect skipper, leader or crewmate. Under the pressure to fulfill her dream, she was plagued by imposter syndrome, and at times was described by her crew as incredibly difficult to work with.

In this way, the documentary breaks waves itself through a realistic exploration of the dark underbelly of a tenacious leader, determined to achieve their dream. Women, in particular, carry a fear that exposing imperfections will override their accomplishments.

Woman sat on the couch watching the documentary on her computer, her screen shows the maiden boat with the crew waving.

The documentary “Maiden,” showcases a sophisticated sense of reflecting on the past and encourages the audience to respect the entirety of Edward’s character, including unvarnished accounts about her.

Through the story of Tracey Edwards making history racing around the world with the “Maiden” crew, Holmes’ film offers viewers the chance to consider the standards for women today.

In exploring the life of a woman who made history, the film critiques the way women are represented and celebrates the feminists who are taking on the world.

Jeni Mundy, one of the Maiden crew encapsulates the crews’ courage, vision and attitude.

“If you believe in everything people tell you you can’t do, what would humankind have achieved?”

‘Maiden’ Film Review: Extraordinary Women Buck the Odds, Sail Around the World in New Documentary

Director Alex Holmes vividly captures an all-female crew defying the elements — and sailing-world sexism — to achieve victory

Tracy Edwards does not easily take “no” for an answer. That’s quickly apparent in “Maiden,” Alex Holmes’ riveting retelling of Edwards’ historic achievement, leading the first all-woman crew in the Whitbread Round the World Race, one of earth’s biggest open sea sailing competitions.

For several months from 1989-1990, she steered her ragtag crew through formidable currents and temperatures both scorching and freezing. She made impossibly difficult decisions and fought her own battles against doubt. Through it all, she kept her crew together and proved their naysayers wrong in spectacular fashion.

Edwards survived a rough and rebellious childhood and entered her wayward young adulthood with no direction in life until she found sailing. Everything about it fascinated her, and it introduced her to exciting characters (like the roaming skippers who traveled wherever they pleased) and a few famous faces like King Hussien of Jordan. It was a world more exciting than anything she had experienced growing up in the U.K. She soon fell in love with competitive sailing, but no matter how badly she wanted to embark on that lifestyle, many crews were reluctant to take on a woman at all. The best Edwards could manage was talking her way into a cook’s position in the 1985-1986 Whitbread Round the World Race.

Realizing men were never going to give her the opportunity she craved, Edwards set out to organize her own all-woman crew to commandeer a fixer-upper boat rechristened the Maiden to show the world that not only could women sail around the world, but they might also win the race as well.

In 1989, sailing was considered exclusively a man’s sport. Many in the field didn’t think women could handle the danger of sailing alone across treacherous waters. They thought sailing around the world would be too physically demanding for women. Past and present interviews show the sexist attitudes the Maiden crew was up against. Even journalists covering the sport at the time mocked the all-woman crew; according to one of the reporters, they took bets on when the Maiden team would drop out of the race. No one outside of the Maiden thought the crew would even make it to the first leg of the journey.

Holmes does an incredible job writing and directing this already action-packed narrative into an impressive documentary. He carefully weaves the crew’s interviews tightly together so that it seems like they’re almost talking among themselves, instead of in separate one-on-one interviews. Diving into an incredible treasure trove of archival footage from news broadcasts and the Maiden’s onboard video diaries, Holmes gives present-day viewers a glimpse into the press’ less-than-stellar coverage of the story and insight into just how treacherous was the journey. Interviews with the Maiden’s crew and its doubters fill in the anecdotes with personally reflective commentary.

Dramatic footage of building-tall waves or ominous icebergs plays against lighter images of bouncing dolphins and the crew celebrating birthdays. Using an old news broadcast, “Maiden” retraces the formidable Whitbread course, which often earned gasps from my audience. Sail around Antartica off the coast of South America in some of the roughest waters in the world? No thanks, I’m good.

The documentary is rather honest in portraying that it wasn’t always smooth sailing aboard the ship either. Tempers flared, especially Edwards’, and one crew member was fired before the race began. The press circled the crew like sharks, looking for any hint of catfights between the all-women crew. Not only did the women fend off negative stories, they also truly had each other’s back. This becomes one of the documentary’s greatest strengths, showing how these women from different backgrounds joined together in sisterly solidarity for the sake of survival and equality.

Those emotional highs and lows are perfectly accompanied by an eclectic score by Rob Manning and Samuel Sim that’s both modern and classical. The movie’s synth-heavy score builds up the drama of the story’s energetic and daring notes. You can often catch it playing during the ’80s newsreels and the old-school camcorder footage. There’s also an edgier violin-led instrumental that hits more of the story’s poignant moments. The number has a sense of urgency in its rhythm. When its lonely violin takes on higher pitches, it mirrors the Maiden’s voyage, forging ahead against detractors and the elements.

After following this ship’s journey, it’s hard not to be moved. The negativity and sexism the crew faced is so purposefully explained earlier in the film that the audience gets a full sense of the emotional response the Maiden earned around the world. It puts us back in a moment not that long ago where it was even more toxic for women to say or do anything that didn’t follow expectations. At a time when the U.S. women’s soccer team is still fighting for equal pay to their male counterparts, the Maiden’s story feels no less relevant. Revisiting the events of “Maiden” allows audiences to appreciate how far we’ve come and how far we still have yet to go when it comes to empowering women to take on the world.

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These Women Sailed Across The World To Prove Men Wrong

Tracy Edwards, the real-life star of the new documentary, Maiden, made history helming the first all-female crew ever to sail across the world.

Note: Some spoilers ahead.

Investors sneered at them, journalists sexified them, and their male competitors insulted them. Nevertheless, as depicted in the new documentary Maiden , 26-year-old skipper Tracy Edwards and her 12-women crew persisted.

The year was 1989 — which doesn’t seem that long ago — but in the world of sailing, a traditionally male sport, Edwards and her crew faced blatant discrimination and economic hurdles on their rocky and riveting voyage to success. The film, released June 28, profiles the woman with a dream that started it all and interweaves interview clips with terrifying footage of 50-foot waves. Despite the hazards, as Edwards has said : “I would say this to anyone thinking about doing anything, don’t think about it, do it.”

Maiden documents the crew as they compete in the Whitbread Round the World yacht race. In front of thousands of supporters, Edwards’ boat, which is named Maiden, wins the first two legs of the Whitbread and ends up finishing in second place. They are, however, first in the spectators’ hearts. It was the best result for a British boat in 17 years and still the best ever for an all-female crew.

[Related: This former boat captain started her own business and is living off the grid ]

As the film depicts, it wasn’t uncommon for men and women to race together — but a female-run boat, at the time, was inconceivable. That motivates Edwards to take on the challenge. As she told Entrepreneur about her thought process: “[With men aboard], a woman sailing with me will never be recognized for her skill, her achievement. I thought the only way we’ll prove that women can do this is if we have an all-female crew.”

Edwards had gained valuable experience from previous sailing competitions. Leaving her home behind, Edwards started as a cook for a male-run boat in the 1985-1986 Whitbread. As one of four female sailors among 23 boats and 230 crew members, she had to fight for her right to be free — and to sail, which were synonymous to her.

“When I’m at sea, I don’t need to look or behave a certain way. I can just be out in the elements and feel like me,” Edwards told Vanity Fair .

Being yourself is easier said than done in a sporting event rife with sexism. To build the Maiden, Edwards started from scratch (literally) and renovated a dilapidated yacht into ship-shape condition. While she worked in a boatyard, she would get comments like “Do you want help with that, love?” Male journalists, too, had choice words for Edwards’ crew, who they called “a tin full of tarts.”

[Related: This woman tackles sexual harassment in the workplace with her new film ]

For two years, Edwards struggled to raise the 1 million British pounds needed to compete in the Whitbread race — no one would invest in an all-female crew. In a chance event, though, King Hussein of Jordan, who took an interest in yachting, was “convinced” to help her. With the funds to back her dream and the wind in her sails, Edwards and her crew were ready to compete — and to dominate. “When women join together,” she told Vanity Fair, “we can do anything.” The rest is history.

After the Maiden’s victories, Edwards sold the ship in 1990 only to rescue it decades later: Edwards crowdfunded 5 million pounds to finance the ship’s restoration. Currently, the Maiden is sailing around the world to promote Edwards’ non-profit, The Maiden Factor , which supports girls’ education and gender equality.

Though Edwards isn’t on board this time around, she’s “happy to be warm and dry. I love running the Maiden Factor Foundation, and I’m happy to provide the vehicle for everyone else to sail her now.”

[Related: This executive talks about closing the gender gap in Hollywood ]

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Review: Lovely And Inspiring Documentary ‘Maidentrip’ Takes Audiences On A Voyage

Katie walsh.

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In 2009, a then 13-year-old Laura Dekker announced her intention to sail around the world alone, incurring the wrath of the Dutch court system, whose objections delayed her trip by a year. While this was going on, Jillian Schlesinger , an aspiring filmmaker in New York, heard about Dekker and wanted in on her journey, sending her a personal letter and designs, asking to help Laura tell her story on film. Thus, two parallel journeys were launched, as these two young women embarked on projects they had never undertaken before. The result is the inspiring “ Maidentrip ,” a collaboration between Schlesinger and Dekker that chronicles Dekker’s journey, and captures her indomitable spirit of adventure.

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The film is a true creative collaboration: Dekker shot all of the footage at sea herself, with a handheld or mounted camera, while Schlesinger met her during several of her stops at port to film Laura on dry land. Dekker’s camera captures stunning sunsets, rolling seas, and wicked storms, but it also becomes her only friend aboard her sailboat Guppy. During the two-year journey, there are times when Dekker is alone at sea for weeks and months at time, and the camera is her “Wilson” of sorts; a confidant, boredom alleviation, a way to celebrate special or challenging moments (crossing the equator, making it around storms at the Cape of Good Hope). This intimate relationship with the camera allows us to see Dekker in an extremely honest light: she’s incredibly, preternaturally capable and confident, but she’s also still just a goofy, awkward teenager with questionable taste in music.

Conversely, Schlesinger’s camera captures Dekker at her most vulnerable: tired and cranky with a Dutch journalist, saying goodbye to sailing friends, or dealing with typical teenage struggles with her family. Both images of the young woman are necessary for this film to work, complicating the image of the brave young sailor, offering different facets of her personality and a more well-rounded portrait for the film.

Schlesinger bolsters Dekker’s historic journey with the story of her very young, yet remarkable life. Born in New Zealand, Dekker spent her first five years on a boat, before her parents moved back to Holland and subsequently split up. Living with her equally sailing-obsessed father, Dekker grew up and learned how to take care of herself quickly, feeling out of place amongst her peers and seeking adventure from an early age. After the dissolution of her family, and instilled by her father with a love of sailing and skill with boats, Dekker just wants to return to the life of a sailor and to the ocean— the one place she feels at home.

Though she’s the youngest person to make this journey, as it becomes apparent during “Maidentrip,” it’s not about completing the trip, it’s about the journey itself. Dekker discovers this during her two-year voyage, her final sail into port is almost anti-climactic after such a life-changing experience. There are other moments along the way that seem more meaningful for her, and both her discovery and the film’s discovery of what’s really important in this story is incredibly poignant.

In its execution of this remarkable tale, the film is simple, yet lovely, using an animated watercolor illustration map of the world to chart Dekker’s journey, and a lilting, acoustic score to round out the soundtrack. The pared-back approach allows the story, and Laura’s adventurous spirit shine through, in the good times and the bad, in stormy weather and in the doldrums. “Maidentrip” ends up being not necessarily about the amazing feat that Dekker accomplished, it’s about finding one’s true self, and enjoying the ride along the way. [B+]

“Sailing Was About Freedom”: The Gripping True Story of the Maiden

By Hillary Busis

Nobody thought that Tracy Edwards could handle the Whitbread Round the World Race, an august and famously difficult sailing competition that challenged yachts to scurry from England to Uruguay to Australia to New Zealand and back. She was young; she was inexperienced; she was, most obviously, a woman, trying to compete in an incredibly male-dominated sport. And in a move that amused her critics even further, Edwards was determined not only to captain a boat herself, but also to lead an all-female crew.

“We didn’t really take it seriously,” one male competitor admits in this exclusive trailer for Maiden, Alex Holmes’s new documentary about Edwards’s journey (named after the yacht she steered through international waters). “We didn’t even think they would finish the first leg,” another says.

But as the documentary shows, Edwards and her crew managed to prove all the naysayers wrong during their historic 1989–1990 race—persevering through innumerable challenges (and some really heinous weather) to not only complete the race, but thrive on the high seas. Their story is an inspiring one, and remarkably relevant to the Time’s Up era—even though it took place nearly 30 years ago. Watch the trailer above, and look for Maiden on the big screen this summer: Sony Pictures Classics will release the film in select theaters on June 28, 2019.

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‘Maiden’ Review: Racing Toward Equality

Alex Holmes’s documentary about a yachting race revisits the ocean terrors and corrosive sexism faced by an all-woman crew.

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By Manohla Dargis

If you want to get an idea of how women, their lives and their contributions get written out of history, consider the Wikipedia entry on “ The 1989-1990 Whitbread Round the World Race ,” which includes the following two simple, factually correct sentences:

“This race featured the first all-woman crew on Tracy Edwards’ Maiden. Although in a much smaller boat than many of their male counterparts the women fared well — claiming two leg victories in Division D.”

These lines are dutifully informative. They’re also a maddeningly incomplete record of how Edwards, who turned 27 during the race, and her young team became headline news across the world. If you want the fuller, richer story of the women’s journey — their struggles at sea and on land, including virulent sexism — the place to turn is “Maiden,” a sleek, exhilarating documentary look back at their race into history. Because while the Wikipedia entry on the 1989-90 competition includes basic information about the event, it neglects the fight for gender parity that Edwards and her crew represent.

The around-the-world race — now called the Ocean Race — is grueling (and terrifying sounding ). Established in 1973, it takes place every three years and lasts up to nine months. The race starts in the fall in Europe; the 2017-18 event, which began in Alicante, Spain, included 11 legs and chewed through 45,000 miles. Given that this is yachting, it’s an elite competition, of course, though not merely because it has also been a historically male one. Boats cost around $1 million to make, and the competition can cost far more. In the 2017-18 race only seven boats participated; in 1989-90 — when Edwards skippered the Maiden — 23 competed in four divisions.

The director Alex Holmes folds in just enough background in “Maiden” to orient non-yachting viewers, but not enough to turn off landlubbers or those without sporty proclivities. His main hook is Edwards, a picture-perfect female rebel. Using archival and new ly shot material, Holmes tells the story of this unruly daughter who left home when she was young , fell in love with sailing and — on deciding that she wanted to navigate the world — found her cause and herself, a discovery that made her a feminist exemplar. It’s an exciting trajectory, partly because it nudges a heroic portrait into a ticktock race toward equality. (The documentary doesn’t say much about her post-milestone years.)

This political narrative arc is what distinguishes “Maiden,” which draws you in even when the predigital images prove less than lovely. Holmes, working with the editor Katie Bryer, uses the archival material smartly, weaving it in to create a sense of you-are-there immediacy and to build the pace as the Maiden sails, stalls and rushes toward the finish. These visuals are complemented by contemporary interviews in which Edwards, a vibrantly natural storyteller, and other crew members recall their great race with both mist in their eyes and modulated outrage. One male journalist covering the event, the sailor Sally Hunter says, called the Maiden “a tin full of tarts.”

It isn’t surprising that the team was plagued by misogyny, but it’s still unsettling that journalists at the time felt so comfortable openly denigrating these women. But then, of course they did; they were sanctioned and empowered by their publications. Even now, one of the male reporters interviewed for the documentary seems entirely too comfortable with his past coverage. Holmes doesn’t challenge him, but he doesn’t need to; the journalist’s smiles speak volumes. They’re also a necessary reminder. What these women did — and what this one race reveals about individual struggle and institutional power — is galvanizing, but of course the larger, difficult story isn’t over.

Rated PG for sexism and ocean peril. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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'Maiden,' sailing documentary featuring all-female crew, premieres Friday

Anna Dimond

Tracy Edwards was a teenager working as a cook for crews on yachts, and in her early 20s, she decided to move from cook to crew member, and she encountered heavy opposition. The answer she received was a resounding no. Still, the event she longed to do as a sailor was the Whitbread Round the World Race (now called the Volvo Ocean Race), a nine-month, 36,000-mile test of skill and will.

And so, in what became a legendary, pioneering flash of inspiration, she decided to form her own 12-person team for the 1989 Whitbread, with the first all-female crew to compete in the race.

First, she needed a boat. And a team. And the money to fund it. Then there was the race itself: a physically and mentally punishing odyssey through some of the world's roughest stretches of sea. Edwards' quest to enter the race was an uphill battle from the start, from the wreck of the boat called "Maiden" to the interpersonal conflicts among teammates to finding the money to assist the team. Spoiler alert: King Hussein of Jordan sponsored the team.

All of which makes for compelling drama in "Maiden," a new documentary from director Alex Holmes about Edwards and the voyage. The movie is not an easy, montage-to-game-day type of sports film with a familiar arc. Instead, "Maiden" eschews sugarcoating. Edwards and her team achieve incredible things together -- but not without major sacrifices.

In an interview with espnW, Edwards, now 56, discussed what it was like seeing herself on screen, how "Maiden" changed her life and what hasn't changed in sailing.

espnW: What was it like watching your story on screen?

Tracy Edwards: I had started this project for my own selfish reasons. Because I wanted to be a navigator. I knew the guys would never let me be a navigator. My world didn't exist, so I had to create my world for me -- not for other women but for me. And it had to be an all-female crew because the guys wouldn't let me in the crew.

But as I'm watching the film, I'm watching myself go through the realization that this isn't about me. And if we fail, the next woman that came along would have an even harder time because she'd have a millstone around her neck.

espnW: In the early scenes in "Maiden," we learn that your mother was a dancer, a rally driver and the first woman to ride a motorbike on the Isle of Man TT course, one of the most dangerous courses in the world. Given the era, that must have been highly unusual. Despite your conflict with her during your teen years, how did she influence you?

Edwards: She's absolutely my role model. Everything good that I am, she was. She would have loved what's happening now.

She never lost faith in me. When I went through that dreadful, awful time in my life, I was vile to her. Not just vile -- I was so destructive. And not just self-destructive -- destructive to everything around me. I wanted to smash everything.

There's one thing in particular I remember I did when I was younger. It was on Mother's Day, and I bought her -- we lived in Wales, and in the local shop they had those plates, with the corny poems on them that you hang on your wall -- I bought one of those for her. And a couple of days later, we had a massive row, and I picked it up and smashed it.

I will never forget the look on her face.

espnW: How has the film impacted you?

Edwards: I'm English, I'm a female, and I'm Roman Catholic. If someone pays me a compliment, I do the whole, "ooh ..." And my daughter said to me once, "Will you please stop doing that thing you do when people pay you a compliment? What you should say is, 'Thank you very much. I'm very proud of what we did.'"

And that's what the film's enabled me to do. It really enabled me to say, "Wow. I'm so proud of what we achieved." Because it was hard. It really was hard. And we worked our socks off.

espnW: After you and your crew completed the Whitbread in 1990, an interviewer in the film says, the "door is open for girls in sailing." Looking at professional sailing 30 years later, did your achievement spur more inclusivity for women in the sport?

Edwards: The doors are supposedly open. [But] there are no more women at the top of sailing now, unless they go out and do their own project. I don't know what it is about sailing that they're so resistant to change.

Someone pointed out to me, they said, "Do you think it's because sailing 'round the world is seen as so swashbuckling?" Like, "Har?! I'm sailing around the world with my beard!" But it's not only round-the-world sailing. It's big boats around the boys. All the big boats series, it's still a struggle to get women on.

They were told no because they were women This is the true story that proved everyone wrong

In 1989, the very idea of a competitive all-female sailboat crew was nearly inconceivable to the manly world of open-ocean yacht racing. They’d never make it to the start of the Whitbread Round the World Race, much less survive to the finish. They’d never find funding. They didn’t have the strength or skill. They’d die at sea. Did that many professional female sailors even exist?

Tracy Edwards proved them wrong. 26-year-old skipper Edwards, her second-hand racing yacht Maiden , and her seasoned crew not only became the first-ever all-woman challenge to the Whitbread, they proved able competitors in the famously grueling race, besting male crews in their class. By the time they returned to their starting point at Southampton, England after 32,000 miles of global racing, they had shocked, inspired, and transfixed the sailing world and the British nation. Tracy Edwards was awarded the 1990 Yachtsman of the Year Award, the first woman ever to receive the accolade, and was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

Maiden ’s story does not begin in such glory. Unlike most of her Maiden crewmates, Edwards did not grow up in a sailing family. After her beloved father died when she was 10, conflict at home with an antagonistic, alcoholic stepfather drove Tracy to anger and rebellion. Although her supportive and adventurous mother stood by her always, Tracy dropped out of school and ran away at 16, finding refuge around island resorts among the hard-partying tribe of boat crew gypsies, working as a cook and stewardess. Sailing represented freedom—and she then set her sights on experiencing the world’s biggest sailing event, the Whitbread Round the World Race that circumnavigated the globe every three years (known since 2001 as the Volvo Ocean Race). In 1985 she managed—barely—to find a berth as a cook on a British boat in the 4th Whitbread Race, observing and absorbing as much as she could about racing “when they’d let me up on deck.” After that exciting taste of the sport—along with the bitter taste of the sport’s pervasive sexism—Edwards became determined to skipper her own boat in the 5th Whitbread, in 1989- 90.

The obstacles were daunting. Racing requires massive financial support, and corporate sponsors were leery of attaching their names to a novel and potentially disastrous effort led by an untried girl in her twenties. When the yachting press paid attention at all, it was to treat Edwards and her campaign as an amusing curiosity.

She didn’t even have her own boat till she found an old racing yacht, beat-up but still sound. Edwards put everything on the line, mortgaging her house to pay for the 58-foot aluminum monohull previously named Disque D’Or and later Prestige , a veteran of two earlier Whitbread races that had performed well. She had been designed to be relatively easily handled on long ocean passages—but when Edwards bought her, she was in disrepair, “a wreck with a pedigree” as Edwards called her.

Edwards may have lacked funds, but what she did have in strength was a knack for finding and inspiring talent. Highly skilled professional women sailors did indeed exist, and they signed on to fight alongside Edwards for recognition, opportunity, and passion for their sport. One of the first to join was Tracy’s girlhood best friend, confidante, and moral support Joanna Gooding, who came aboard as cook (and behind-the-scenes videographer). Many of the crew members had far more sailing knowledge and experience than Edwards herself, but her relentless determination made her a leader, even when she battled exhaustion and self-doubt.

To get to the Whitbread start line in the first place, the crew rolled up their sleeves to painstakingly tear down and refurbish Maiden in the venerable Hamble shipyard, a traditionally male bastion. By carrying out the refurb themselves, the crew knew every cable, bolt, and latch on the boat—which proved life-saving when they were able to diagnose and repair a leak at sea off Cape Horn. Edwards and crew adapted the boat to compensate for the lesser physical strength of a female crew but to benefit their talents; for example, the foresails were smaller than those on their competitors’ male-crewed yachts because they require frequent changing. Because the Maiden crew could muscle their way quickly through resetting foresails, they could use sail changes strategically. Maiden n wore the colors of Royal Jordanian Airlines, the sponsor Tracy finally secured through the patronage of Jordan’s King Hussein.

The story of Maiden ’s upstart, defiant run at the Whitbread Round the World Race has all the elements of an epic adventure tale—50-foot waves, life and death drama, near-mutiny, thrilling victory—grounded in a perceptive group portrait of a team of courageous young women led by the remarkable, complicated Tracy Edwards. They pioneered the sport of long-distance racing for the women who followed and inspired women in all fields to prove themselves the equal of men.

The Maiden & The Whitbread

The whitbread round the world race began in 1973, sponsored by britain’s whitbread, a brewery that evolved into a hotel and hospitality chain. the race, held every three years, switched sponsors in 2001 and is now known as the volvo ocean race., maiden competed in the 5th wrtwr which comprised several classes of different boat sizes and six legs totalling 32,000 nautical miles. in more recent years, smaller yachts such as tracy edwards’ 58-foot maiden no longer run the volvo ocean race, which is dominated by bigger yachts racing more and shorter legs., maiden won two of the legs, the longest and shortest, in the 5th wrtwr and came in second overall in her class, the best result for a british boat in 17 years, and still remaining the best result ever for an all-female crew., september 2, 1989, southampton, england to punta del este, uruguay, 5,938 miles, punta del este to fremantle, australia, the southern ocean crossing, 7,260 miles, as skipper, tracy determined navigation, choosing the daring strategy of sailing the most southerly route, which was most direct but also challenging, with huge seas and icebergs. 52 days at sea in extreme conditions. creighton’s naturally , a contestant in a larger boat class, lost two men overboard in frigid seas. they were recovered with hypothermia. maiden was the closest vessel, and the medic onboard, claire warren, instructed the creighton ’s crew by radio in resuscitating the men. one survived. maiden won the 2nd leg for her class., december 23, 1989, fremantle to auckland, new zealand, 3,272 miles, the shortest leg. maiden again wins this leg., february 4, 1990, auckland to punta del este, 6,255 miles, over this and the following leg, the 18-hour overall lead time in class that maiden had built up on her winning legs 2 and 3 evaporated on legs 4 and 5 due to 100 days at sea with little wind followed by pounding waves that caused a leak around the mainmast. with the boat taking on water in open sea, the crew was able to find and patch the leak, but time was lost., march 17, 1990, punta del este to ft. lauderdale, florida, 5,475 miles, by the end of this leg, maiden was 16 hours behind the class leader, the belgian boat rucanor ., may 5, 1990, ft. lauderdale to southampton, 3,818 miles, despite low wind, maiden regains some time in this leg. when rucanor is stuck on a sand bank off the coast of england maiden is just behind her. l’esprit de liberté wins the leg and the overall race in division d with maiden second and rucanor placing third. but for the thousands of spectators on shore and the swarm of yachts and dinghies accompanying maiden into port, it was a momentous triumph for the hometown yacht maiden , her intrepid crew, and her inspiring skipper, tracy edwards..

“Seeing the documentary, once again, made me realize that the achievement of Maiden was truly a historic first, something I believe that most of us—to this day—have not always been able to comprehend.”

Mikaela Von Koskull

“For all of us it was a big dream that came true. The trust and respect for each other, the strong sisterhood of my Maiden friends makes me feel strong in difficult times."

Tanja Visser

"If what we did inspired people and changed misconceptions then that is a very good thing that happened from something that was so enjoyable."

Sally Creaser Hunter

Tracy edwards, mbe · skipper.

Tracy Edwards is the central figure in Maiden , the documentary feature about her successful effort to compete in the 1989/90 Whitbread Round the World Race skippering the first all- female crew.

Cook, Videographer

“When we were on Maiden we didn't really take much notice of the negative things that were being said. Even when it was said that we could die and that would be a tragedy— we agreed it would be and no-one had any intention of dying!”

Marie-Claude Kieffer Heys

As First Mate she played a key role in Maiden ’s intensive six-month tear-down and refit project and devoted two years to preparations for Maiden ’s Whitbread campaign.

Watch Captain, Diver, Engineer

As Watch Captain on Maiden , she and her co-captain Michèle Paret traded shifts on deck command while Skipper Tracy Edwards typically focused on strategy and navigation. Dawn’s physical strength also served her as Driver and Engineer.

Michèle Paret

Watch captain and helm.

Michèle met and raced with Marie-Claude Keiffer in France, joined Maiden with her, and took Marie-Claude’s position when she left the team. She became one of the two watch captains under Tracy.

Helm, Safety Equipment

"It took a lot of skill and physical strength to keep that boat going fast in the right direction in some very heavy sea and wind conditions."

Maiden was Jeni’s first experience of professional sailing. She did go on to complete the Whitbread Race again four years later.

Foredeck and Sailmaker

Watchwoman, Helm, Deck Hardware

Mikaela is the only sailor to have taken part in all three of Tracy Edwards’ sailing ventures: the ’89 Maiden campaign; the 2001 Maiden catamaran outing; and the launch of the Maiden Factor.

Claire Russell

Sail trimmer, medic.

When Claire heard an-all female crew was being put together and needed a doctor she signed up straight away.

Amanda Swan Neal

Nancy Harris

Sail trimmer, deck hardware.

"When we screened the film, it was good to show my family a part of my life they really didn’t know much about."

Angela Heath

Sail trimmer.

A chance encounter with Tracy Edwards in a bar in Cork led to her competing in the Fastnet Race with the Maiden team.

Sarah Davies

Reserve crew member.

Having spotted a small advert in Yachts and Yachting for crew wanted for Maiden , with leave of absence granted by the Army, she joined the team as reserve crew nine months before the race.

Howard Gibbons

Project manager.

The all-female Maiden crew actually had several men as well as women on shore crew, led by Howard Gibbons, who managed project planning and land operations from the very start of the campaign.

Directed by Alex Holmes
Executive Producer James Erskine
Screenplay Alex Holmes
Cinematographer Chris Openshaw
Editor Katie Bryer
Music Rob Manning Samuel Sim

Alex Holmes Director

Alex is a Bafta-winning filmmaker with extensive experience in producing, directing, and writing acclaimed documentaries and dramas. His work as a writer-director includes searing documentary STOP AT NOTHING: THE LANCE ARMSTRONG STORY for BBC’s Storyville, which Variety magazine described as “riveting... devastating... thought-provoking”, as well as Emmy, Bafta and RTS-winning factually-based dramas HOUSE OF SADDAM, DUNKIRK and COALITION. Last year Alex directed the horror influenced revenge drama for BBC 2 which the Telegraph called “Harrowing, brilliant and superbly directed.” Alex most recently directed the theatrical documentary MAIDEN, which tells the epic story of Tracy Edwards who, through sheer grit and determination, successfully skippered the first ever all-female crew in the Whitbread round the world yacht race.

Katie Bryer Editor

Katie Bryer initially trained as a drama editor, first at the National Film and Television School in London and later at the BBC. Katie started working on documentaries in 2010 and has worked on many award-winning features with subjects ranging from forced marriage, to human trafficking, from Mount Everest to the moon. Her first feature documentary was the snowboarding movie WE RIDE, before she went on to co-edit the Oscar-nominated VIRUNGA, directed by Orlando von Einsiedel. In 2014 she returned to her drama roots and edited the award-winning romantic-comedy SUPERBOB, directed by Jon Drever. The film was described as a 'modern romantic classic' by Ricky Gervais. In 2015 she worked with Orlando again on MOON SHOT, a series of short documentaries for J.J. Abram’s company Bad Robot. In 2016 Katie edited BRUCE LEE & THE OUTLAW, a film built from footage shot by the photographer Joost Vandebrug over the course of 8 years. In 2017 Katie made two more feature docs: MAIDEN, an archive- based feature about the first ever all-female crew to take part in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race, and as additional editor on ‘EVELYN. Orlando von Einsiedel’s heartbreaking journey into his own family’s history with suicide.

Chris Openshaw Cinematographer

London based Director of Photography Chris Openshaw has been involved in documentary and drama for 25 years. His wealth of experience draws on his creative abilities in lighting, composition and technical knowledge to deliver exciting and original images. His CV reflects the vast array of projects he has been involved with. He has travelled to many countries and his proven creativity and reliability in all extremes and environments has led to international recognition and many awards. His most recent works include ONE STRANGE ROCK, an extraordinary documentary series in which Astronauts tell the story of the earth from their unique perspective, and MAIDEN, the epic story of the first ever all-female crew to compete int he Whitbread round the world yacht race.

Victoria Gregory Producer

Victoria has a wealth of experience in producing both documentary and drama at a high level. After working at the BBC making factual dramas like Space Race and Dunkirk, Victoria also worked on the critically acclaimed drama Last Resort directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Since leaving the BBC Victoria has worked as part of the producing team on the BAFTA award winning feature documentary Senna and co-produced the Oscar winning Man on Wire. Since forming New Black films with James Erskine in 2009 Victoria has produced all of New Black Films‘ output including Pantani, Battle of The Sexes, The Ice King, and MAIDEN in 2018. Victoria is currently producing Billie, a moving portrait of the greatest jazz singer of all-time: Billie Holiday.

James Erskine Executive Producer

James is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose work as a writer/director/producer includes, in addition to his New Black Films projects, VANISHING OF THE BEES; OIL STORM, an award-winning TV movie for FX; and EMR, a theatrically released independent feature, and winner of several film festivals including Raindance. He has also directed several episodes of popular BBC dramas Robin Hood, Torchwood, Holby City and EastEnders , among others. In 2017 James directed SACHIN: A BILLION DREAMS, a feature documentary about the life of Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar, the film went on to smash box office records in India. His most recent film, THE ICE KING, tells the story of John Curry, the Olympic gold medallist ice skater who challenged norms in both art and sexuality. The film was released to critical acclaim in the UK earlier this year and has gone on to be sold around the world. As well as developing New Black Films’ current projects, James is currently directing , a portrait of the greatest jazz singer of all time, Billie Holiday.

Sam Brayshaw Associate Producer

A key member of the team at New Black Films since 2016 Sam has a background in both documentary and drama, working as an assistant on various shows including the feature documentary STOP AT NOTHING: THE LANCE ARMSTRONG STORY, Channel 4’s RTS winning political drama COALITION and BBC 2’s horror influenced drama series PAULA in 2017. More recently Sam associate produced on Channel 4’s thrilling documentary HUNTING THE KGB KILLERS about the poisoning of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko on British soil and MAIDEN, a feature documentary that tells the story of the first ever all-female crew to compete in the Whitbread Round the world Yacht Race

Tracy Edwards MBE · Skipper

Tracy Edwards is the central figure in MAIDEN, the documentary feature about her successful effort to compete in the 1989/90 Whitbread Round the World Race skippering the first all- female crew. In 1990, Tracy was awarded the MBE (Member of the British Empire) by HM Queen Elizabeth II; the Royal Jordanian Air Force Wings by HM King Hussein of Jordan; and became the first woman in its 34-year history to be awarded the Yachtsman of the Year Trophy. Her memoir of the race, Maiden, was Whitbread Sports Book of the Year and on the Times bestseller list for 19 weeks.

In 1998, Tracy put together the first all-female crew to attempt the fastest non-stop circumnavigation by sail. Her 92-foot catamaran broke five world records. Her second memoir, Living Every Second, was published in 2001. Maiden II in 2001 saw Tracy create and manage the world’s first ever mixed gender fully professional racing team which broke many world speed records in their 120ft catamaran. In 2005, Edwards created and managed the first ever round the world race to start and finish in the Middle East.

Tracy retired from sailing in 2005 and worked for CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection) as Project Manager for their International Youth Advisory Conference. During 2009 - 2012 she studied at Roehampton University and graduated with a 2:1 Degree in Psychology. Currently, Tracy has combined these passions for sailing, female empowerment, and youth advocacy with her Maiden Factor Foundation, named for her original sailboat. She rescued Maiden from a dilapidated condition, restored the 58’ monohull to its former glory, and is organizing round-the-world fundraising and awareness tours for her foundation. Maiden , an iconic part of British maritime history, now has a new life as an Ambassador and fundraiser for girls’ education.

Tracy Edwards on fighting sexism

“30 years ago, it may have been easier for us to have the battle than I think it is for young women today, because when we came up against sexism it was in your face. It was—Bam! It was something you could fight. You know, that you could see and you could take hold of it. And you could shout and fight. Now it's insidious. No one would dare to be overtly sexist now or misogynistic; it's kind of gone under the radar. And I think that's really worrying. It’s a new conversation—the discussion hasn't gone away. It's just taken a different form. So, with The Maiden Factor we’ve decided to engage men more within the project, including sailing on the boat for the first time.”

Jo Gooding Cook, Videographer

Jo remains one of Tracy’s closest friends having known each other since their childhood in Wales. But the pair couldn’t be more different; in stark contrast to Tracy’s high energy, go get ’em attitude, Jo is perennially calm, shy and insightful.

Before Maiden , Jo was working in a pub in her hometown and had lost touch with Tracy, but out of the blue Tracy gave her a call and told her about the idea for competing in the Whitbread Maiden . Jo had never sailed competitively but immediately answered Tracy’s call to become the cook on board. She also served as the principal videographer though she also shared filming with other crew members.

Post Maiden Jo went back to the Isles of Scilly, working in the local hospital and volunteering in the school. She moved back to the mainland and worked in various caring roles including Adult Mental Health and children and young people with learning and physical disabilities.

In 2002, Jo trained as a Counsellor and in 2006, set up her own business working with children, adolescents and adults. She completed her Postgraduate Certificate in Education in teaching in 2008, and now delivers courses, workshops as well as health and well-being programmes.

Jo Gooding on doomsayers:

Marie-Claude Kieffer Heys First Mate

Marie-Claude was born in the seaside town of Brest, Brittany, France, to parents who enjoyed yacht racing as a hobby. She started sailing school at the age of 7, participating with family in races on her parents’ boat. By 16, Marie-Claude took charge of her father’s 28-foot sailboat for cruising and racing with friends, bringing early lessons in responsibility and freedom. To further her dream of someday competing in the Whitbread Race, she learned sailmaking, boat building, and every aspect of yacht racing, and supported herself as a professional sailor from a very young age.

In 1983, she entered the single-handed Figaro race, a key race for gaining media coverage and, subsequently, sponsorship. This also proved to be a key race in developing her confidence in her own abilities. She competed in this race again in 1987, 1990, and 1991, with respectable results. She skippered female crews for the Tour de France à la Voile in 1985 and 1986.

At the age of 25, Marie-Claude completed her first victorious transatlantic race: Monaco-New York on Lady Elf with a crew of 7 women and 5 men. She used her prize money on another mode of transportation, buying a motorcycle from another crew member.

When she heard about Tracy Edwards’ campaign to bring an all-female crew to the Whitbread Race, she immediately sent Tracy her CV, eventually bringing two of her sailing comrades, Jeni Mundy and Michèle Paret, onboard the Maiden team with her. As First Mate she played a key role in Maiden ’s intensive six-month tear-down and refit project and devoted two years to preparations for Maiden ’s Whitbread campaign.

The leadership conflict with Tracy Edwards that led to her sacking shortly before the start of the Whitbread Race is captured in the Maiden documentary feature. Although she was angry and disappointed that she missed the chance to race the Whitbread with Maiden , she went on to complete the race twice: in 1993 on board Heineken (invited by skipper Dawn Riley), then again in 1997 on EF Education . In 2011 she again sailed Heineken in the Volvo Alicante regatta with a 12-woman team made up of representatives from all 4 previous all-girl Whitbread/Volvo campaigns. Marie-Claude and Tracy have been able to settle their differences and sustain a long-term relationship of cordial respect and friendship.

After retiring from professional sailing Marie-Claude married a fellow sailor and moved to Hamble in Hampshire, where Maiden was based all those years ago. She now runs a company importing and brokering boats, Key Yachting, and sails year-round with customers and friends.

“Overall it is still tough for the girls. Girls who train hard and earn their stripes are now seen at all level of campaigns and have gained respect. However, the imbalance of weight and strength, plus stereotypical mindsets, still makes it a man’s world in many types of boats. The boat designs have become more and more extreme, requiring fewer crew but more brute physical strength—so if you need to take the strongest people, obviously that won’t be the women. Now the Volvo race requires two women on every crew—otherwise there probably wouldn’t be any.”

Dawn Riley Watch Captain, Diver, Engineer

Dawn Riley, the only American on the Maiden team, began sailing as a young girl with her family in Michigan on Lake St. Clair (“nothing yacht-clubby”) and has supported herself on and around boats since age 14, putting herself through college boat-captaining. The Great Lakes trained her well in extreme conditions and heavy seas. She jumped at the chance to join a Whitbread team with Maiden , intrigued to see what an all-female team could achieve.

Within 36 hours of Maiden crossing the finish line in 1990, Dawn was back in New York appearing on the David Letterman show, snatched up by the producers as the American rep on the high-profile team. She had graduated from Michigan State in Advertising before the race and this served her well as her career went from strength to strength in the sailing world. In 1996, as CEO and Captain of America True, Dawn was the first woman to manage an America’s Cup sailing team. She has raced on four Americas Cup campaigns and two Whitbreads (now Volvo Ocean Race). In the 1993-4 race she was Skipper of Heineken , joined on her team by several former Maiden crew members.

Dawn is a former president of the Women’s Sport Foundation, founded by Billie Jean King, and is active in many public service and political activities. Dawn serves as a board member of the NGB – US Sailing and the SCS Democratic Club. She was co-author of Taking the Helm, an autobiographical story of her Round the World Race experiences.

Dawn is a television commentator and experienced public speaker, on topics ranging from entertaining adventure stories to motivational seminars in team building and personal success She considers herself to be a well–rounded, accomplished businesswoman, community leader and youth sports advocate, author, speaker, TV commentator and committed philanthropist. Most recently, Dawn created and runs Oakcliff Sailing Center, a unique training and coaching center that is “Building American Leaders through Sailing.” Dawn believes that this center will prove to be significant in creating leaders inside and outside the marine industry.

Dawn Riley on the audacity of the Maiden challenge:

“I’m quoted in the documentary saying I didn’t believe there were any other really good female sailors in the world. I didn’t say that to be snotty—though it sounds a little that way. I was underscoring how absolutely radical an idea Tracy’s campaign was, and what a fantastic opportunity it was for really competitive, ambitious women like us.”

Michèle Paret Watch Captain & Helm

French sailor Michèle Paret has always been an active sportswoman, devoting her youth to wind surfing, climbing and mountain biking until she discovered sailing. She met and raced with Marie-Claude Keiffer in France, joined Maiden with her, and took Marie-Claude’s position when she left the team. She became one of the two watch captains under Tracy.

She spoke no English when she came aboard Maiden —the first vocabulary she mastered was the names of tools. She quickly picked up the language.

After the race she met her partner in sailing, racing, and life Dominique Wavre and the pair continued sailing together, achieving a successful 3rd place in the Quebec to St Malo Transat. In 2007 they placed 3rd in the Barcelona World Race.

Michèle continues to sail and has over 170,000 sea miles on the open seas with vast experience of crewed and solo ocean regattas. Due to her almost continuous travel we were unable to find a time to interview Michèle for the film.

Michèle Paret on how women collaborate:

“I discovered onboard Maiden a different way of women working together to achieve the same performance as men, a typically feminine and caring solidarity amongst us. Approaching the finish line, I simultaneously felt a huge joy mixed with a huge pain, mixed up with tears... All the girls were in the front of the boat but I couldn’t go up there. The finish line marked the end of this great adventure, but the beginning of many others.”

Sally Creaser Hunter Helm, Safety Equipment

Scotswoman Sally Creaser (now Hunter) came from a sailing family and raced extensively in both Scotland and Northern Ireland. She took a job working in a boatyard, heard about Maiden early on, and wanted to join up. She traveled down to Hamble and was hired by Tracy on the spot because of her experience and sense of humour.

Onboard Maiden , Sally worked mostly in the cockpit, at the helm or winches.

After the ‘89 race Sally continued sailing until 1991 when she finished second in the ‘Azores and Back’ race. She married in 1995 to Iain Hunter and set up her own company, Hunter Yacht Deliveries, as well as a swim school in her local Scottish town, Arran. Her two sons are both professional sailors; the older, Neil, sails for Ben Ainslie’s Americas Cup campaign. Sally is still heavily involved in the sailing world.

Sally Hunter on physical strength and skill:

“A lot of credit for how well we did should go to the girls who were so good at helming the boat, in the Southern Ocean especially. It took a lot of skill and physical strength to keep that boat going fast in the right direction in some very heavy sea and wind conditions. Every one of the helms suffered from tendonitis in our wrists from the constant movements necessary.”

Jeni Mundy Foredeck

Jeni finished university with a BSc in Maths with Philosophy and in need of an adventure. She had grown up sailing and racing dinghies on the Thames with her family, and spent a couple of post-bac years in the Caribbean where she met Marie-Claude Kieffer and advanced her sailing skills. Marie-Claude connected her with Tracy’s Maiden crew search.

Maiden was Jeni’s first experience of professional sailing. She did go on to complete the Whitbread Race again four years later. It was during the preparation for the 1989 race that Jeni realized a talent for electronics when laying the cables in the refurb of Maiden .

After her stint sailing, Jeni gained a Masters in Electronic Engineering and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers. She worked in New Zealand telecommunications in various Engineering roles before joining Vodafone as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and leading the Enterprise Product Division for Vodafone Group. She has also worked with Auto Trader, the UK’s largest digital automotive marketplace, as an Independent Non-Exec Board Director.

Jeni is currently Regional Managing Director for UK and Ireland for Visa, the credit card giant.

Jeni Mundy on endurance:

“Human beings are amazing. We can achieve and endure so much more than we think. We’re amazingly resilient. During the Southern Ocean crossing we lived in extreme conditions, minus twenty with the wind chill, lucky to get two hours sleep, exhausted but two hours is better than no hours. The definition of a team is having confidence that every single one is fully braced to take on whatever happens. We were that kind of team.”

Tanja Visser Foredeck and Sailmaker

A childhood sailing in her native Holland gave Tanja a passion for sailing and when she had finished her studies in both dentistry and photography she jumped at the chance to make a career change into professional sailing for a while. When she joined Maiden she became the first Dutch woman to have taken part in the race.

In addition to her jobs as bowman and sailmaker, Tanja brought a dental emergency kit onboard as she was already a professional dentist. She also helmed, and did some of the video filming and still photography. During the race she met her husband, a watch captain on board ‘Merit’. Tanja was the first of the Maiden crew to have a child, so their daughter is the first child to be born to parents who both completed the Whitbread.

After the ‘89 race Tanja continued sailing until the early 2000’s, meanwhile setting up her own dental surgery outside Amsterdam. Tanja also breeds dressage horses and owns her own studfarm where she lives with her two children and six dogs.

Tanja Visser on the Maiden experience:

“For all of us it was a big dream that came true. The trust and respect for each other, the strong sisterhood of my Maiden friends makes me feel strong in difficult times. It’s part of ourselves and I carry it with me always. If you believe in something, go for it, work hard, and never give up.”

Mikaela Von Koskull Watchwoman, Helm, Deck Hardware

Originally from Korpo, in the southwestern Archipelago of Finland, Mikaela inherited her love and respect of nature and sea, from a long line of seafarers in her family. She started her career graduating as Radio Officer from Mariehamn Maritime Institute, working on merchant ships, followed by ship ́s purser on passenger ships. Slowly she gained sea-miles and experience to follow her real dream: to become a professional yachtswoman on sailing yachts.

As well as crewing on Maiden in 1989, Mikki participated in the next Whitbread on Heineken ’s all-woman crew skippered by Dawn Riley. She is the only sailor to have taken part in all three of Tracy Edwards’ sailing ventures: the ’89 Maiden campaign; the 2001 Maiden II catamaran outing; and the launch of the Maiden Factor. Mikki has also participated in both the Jacques Vabre and Jules Verne race events and on the Multihull circuit. Having spent so many miles and years on fast, extreme yachts, both in the Northern and Southern Hempishere, she now enjoys being part of similar expeditions (although on somewhat slower ships).

Since 2009 she has been working as a tour guide, mainly in Europe and Africa, as well as zodiac driver in Svalbard and Greenland; she is drawn to places that offer both vast open space and astounding nature. When not enjoying her two favourite areas, the North and the South Pole, Mikaela enjoys being at home on her small farm in Portugal, riding her horse or hiking in the Alentejo countryside.

As another world traveler difficult to pin down, Mikaela could not be interviewed for the Maiden film.

Mikaela Von Koskull on Maiden ’s dream fulfilled:

“Having been brought up in a country that was rather equal-opportunity, I had decided, many years before Maiden , that racing big boats across the ocean was the thing I wanted to do—not because I’m a woman, but simply because it was my dream. We all just wanted the opportunity to do it. Maiden was really my steppingstone for a lifetime in sailing. Tracy made that happen.”

Claire Russell Sail Trimmer, Medic

Born in Birmingham, England, Claire studied medicine at the Royal Free Medical School in London. She began sailing as a university student, so was a keen but somewhat inexperienced sailor relative to the Maiden crew. When Claire heard an-all female crew was being put together and needed a doctor she signed up straight away.

During the race Claire showed incredible grace under pressure when two men fell overboard into the Southern Ocean on board ‘Creighton’s Naturally’. With Maiden being the closest boat to Creighton’s, Claire took to the radio and talked the crew through emergency care for the two men once they had recovered them from the fatally cold ocean. Through Claire’s instruction the Creighton’s crew were able to save the life of one man, Bart Vandendway, but tragically were unable to save the other, Anthony Phillips, who perished on board.

Claire also met her future husband during the race, Peter Warren, a New Zealander who was racing on ‘NBC Ireland’. In the years following the Whitbread, Claire continued to sail, travel and practice medicine, eventually specializing in Accident and Emergency Medicine in the UK.

After their daughters were born in 1997 and 1999, Peter and Claire moved to New Zealand and Claire worked as a Rural General Practitioner and primary response doctor, also becoming a Fellow of the New Zealand College of General Practitioners.

Claire is presently a senior staff doctor in an ‘Urgent Care’ centre in Hamilton, New Zealand; a facility providing 24-hour accident and medical care to the population of Waikato area.

They run a small equestrian facility and Peter runs a farm contracting business. Their eldest daughter Jessica is in her third year at Wellington University, NZ, and Leah is in her second university year in the United States on a sports scholarship.

Claire Russell on facing danger:

“If you send a whole load of 20-year-olds round the world doing high-profile dangerous sport, for lots of reasons there’s potential that people could die. In truth, any doctor could have done what I did, talking the other boat through hypothermia treatment. We were close to Creighton’s, we knew them. I had friends on that boat. So, my voice on the radio gave them permission to act. I was a step distanced from their desperate situation and awful emotions because I was on the end of a radio. A lot of medicine is just support. When we reached port, Bart came up and gave me a box of chocolates—it was wonderful!”

Amanda Swan Neal Rigger

Amanda grew up in Auckland, New Zealand and sailed to North America as a teenager aboard a 38’ sloop that she helped her parents build. She has spent her life on and around sailboats.

She was rigger aboard Maiden , then in 1994 joined her future husband John Neal aboard Mahina Tiare II for a series of sail-training expeditions from NZ to Cape Horn and Antarctica. They still own and operate Mahina Expeditions, leading ocean sail-training expeditions worldwide aboard Mahina Tiare III and also present instructional sailing seminars at major boat shows worldwide.

Amanda is author of The Essential Galley Companion and Marine Diesel Engine Essentials - A Coloring and Learning Book created to help demystify engine systems, and since 2005, she has written the monthly Galley Essentials column in 48 North magazine. She and John write for four sailing magazines and submit cruising images to yachting journals.

Amanda’s 335,00 miles of ocean sailing include two Sydney-Hobart Races, numerous international regattas and seven Cape Horn roundings intermixed with a ten-year involvement in tall ship sail-training. Amanda and John recently sailed from 80 degrees north, above Spitsbergen, to New Zealand. Mahina Tiare will be based in the South Pacific for the next five years.

Still based in New Zealand, Amanda enjoys introducing women to the joys of the cruising lifestyle and her personal interests include Celtic step dancing, photography, triathlon training and sewing.

Amanda is not interviewed in Maiden .

Amanda Swan Neal on the job of rigger:

“For me Maiden was a dream come true. I was the first woman in New Zealand to complete a sailmaker’s apprenticeship and first woman rigger in the Southern Hemisphere, so it was fantastic to work and race aboard Maiden and hone my skills. My job as rigger on Maiden entailed taking care of the mast and rigging. I was responsible for keeping the mast up, ensuring that the standing rigging helped keep the mast up and that the running rigging was in order for controlling the sails. This entailed daily trips to the top of the mast for rig inspection and broken or tangled halyards. I’m proud I personally stuck the course, we didn’t drop the mast, there were no major incidents, and that we were the first woman crew to race around the world—no one can ever take that away from us!”

Nancy Harris Sail Trimmer, Deck Hardware

Born and bred in Hampshire, England, Nancy grew up in Hamble, the hub of England’s boatbuilding and professional sailing circuit. Nancy began sailing singlehanded boats in her teens before beginning in offshore sailing.

In 1988 she had a chance meeting with Howard Gibbons on board a bus and she went along to meet Tracy Edwards that day and joined Maiden .

After the race finished, Nancy remained in Hampshire and enjoys life in the countryside with her husband, two daughters and several horses.

Nancy Harris on the joys of dry land:

“When we screened the film, it was good to show my family a part of my life they really didn’t know much about. It was wonderful to see how well everyone was, and to follow Tracy’s projects, but I am happy with my feet on the ground and looking after my animals and garden. I’ve tried to instill in my children the values I learned from Maiden : don’t give up. There is always a way of overcoming anything.”

Angela Heath Sail Trimmer

Irishwoman Angela worked as a secretary/receptionist in National Board for Science & Technology and six years in an insurance company until in 1989 a chance encounter with Tracy Edwards in a bar in Cork led to her competing in the Fastnet Race with the Maiden team. Tracy then invited her to join Maiden as Sail Trimmer for the 1989 race.

She continued to work in various administration roles until 1994 when she became a mum of two boys.

From 2001 to 2006 Angela worked as Office Manager in Viking Marine, Clothing & Marine Specialists, Dun Laoghaire.

A change in career direction led her to join a doctor as Practice Manager in a newly established GP practice. She remained in the medical industry until early 2017.

Angela lives in Dublin Bay with her family and friends. She also loves gardening, hill-walking, piano, snow-skiing and pottery.

Sarah Davies Reserve Crew Member

Sarah served with the Woman’s Royal Navy Service (WRNS) from 1982 and before going to Sandhurst to train as an Army Officer.

Having spotted a small advert in Yachts and Yachting for crew wanted for Maiden, with leave of absence granted by the Army, she joined the team as reserve crew nine months before the race. She completed one leg of the race from New Zealand to Australia in place of Sally Creaser.

After the race, Sarah continued to race with the Army offshore team and racing a variety of other boats including their Nordic Folkboat.

She has lived and worked in Kiel, Germany, London, Suffolk and Cyprus. A brief foray away from sailing saw her working with one of the City of London Livery Companies, the Worshipful Company of Saddlers, which only served to encourage her two daughters’ passion for riding, and she now spends her spare time, along with Simon her husband, as groom and horse transporter.

Sarah has three children, two who have sailed in the GBR Junior and Youth teams and the third who prefers to be on horseback.

Howard Gibbons Project Manager

Before he met Tracy Edwards, Howard was a journalist working for a local newspaper in Southampton. Having been close to the sailing community for some time he had some experience of helping to organise professional crews. When he heard the idea for Maiden he was the first person to encourage Tracy to go for it.

He became the project manager before the team was in place and used his press connections to push the idea to a wider audience. He motivated Tracy to speak publicly and front the project and gave her extensive media training. Howard was also Tracy’s rock and was always there, right beside her, if doubt ever set in.

After the ‘89 race Howard went on to project manage Heineken in the 1993 race (skippered by Dawn Riley and crewed by several Maiden alums). He also managed Tracy in the early 2000’s with her Maiden 2 catamaran campaign.

Howard still lives in Hamble and has been helping manage the refurbishment of Maiden throughout 2018. He has also served as the project manager for the Volvo Oceans Legends Race.

Howard Gibbons on a once-in-a-lifetime experience:

“Every so often a sporting first comes along that transcends sport itself to become world famous for a whole set of reasons. Tracy’s determination to make it happen against all the odds, and gathering such a wonderful crew and support team around her to make it so, was, and still is, an epic achievement, and to say it changed perceptions of women in sailing is an understatement. It was unprecedented, challenging, great, wonderful and a lot of fun. We had the time of our lives.”

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14-year-old Laura Dekker sets out on a two-year voyage in pursuit of her dream to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone. 14-year-old Laura Dekker sets out on a two-year voyage in pursuit of her dream to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone. 14-year-old Laura Dekker sets out on a two-year voyage in pursuit of her dream to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone.

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16 User reviews
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70 Metascore
3 wins & 1 nomination

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Trivia In August 2009, Laura Dekker announced her plan for a two-year solo sailing voyage around the globe in the Dutch national newspaper, Algemeen Dagblad.

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Dec 22, 2013

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Runtime 1 hour 22 minutes

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Hidden-gem documentary with ultra-rare 98% on Rotten Tomatoes is leaving Netflix

Maiden is one of those rare highly-rated documentaries that everyone should watch, whether interested in sailing or not

There’s nothing quite like starting the year off with a great documentary – it can be a great way to reset yourself a little and gain some new perspective. Maiden is one of the best of recent years, too, and it’s been nestled on Netflix for a little while , but will be leaving the service on 13 January – so you don’t have long to check it out!

And that start the year off great is also the ending to something else brilliantly fun: this is the last entry in T3's 12 Days of Streaming , featuring a must-watch movie posted daily from Christmas Day 2023 through to today, Twelfth Night, when you've got to take all your decorations down!

Maiden tells the awe-inspiring story of Tracy Edwards, a passionate yacht racer who in the late 1980s assembled the first ever all-woman crew to take on the astounding challenge of the Whitbread Round the World Race – which was exactly as massive a hurdle as it sounds on the tin.

This was a race dominated almost exclusively by men, and the amount of pushback, out-and-out sexism and patronising warnings they have to suffer through is incredibly galling, needless to say. That’s before you turn to the actual physical peril of yachting in crazy storms miles and miles from any form of help, too.

Part of what makes Maiden such a success, though – as demonstrated by that unbelievably high 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes – is that it does a terrific job of not just portraying the physical challenges that the crew faces, but also delving into the emotional realities, too.

After all, Tracy Edwards didn’t just have to actually captain her yacht, she had to finance it, push back against those who didn’t want her or her team competing, and do it all against a backdrop of genuine danger and the very highest stakes.

Getting a proper look into her mindset, both from the at times incredible footage from the race itself, and in interviews with her older self, creates a pretty touching and impressive portrait of what it can look like to harness an obsession powerfully, and to let your passion drive you forward.

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You’ve got only a little time remaining to make sure you don’t miss this one, and while it might not be quite as famous as other documentaries that have caught fire on Netflix , it’s every bit as good as any of them. Whether you like sailing or not is irrelevant, as this is a human tale that must be seen.

Max is a freelance writer with years of experience in tech and entertainment. He's also a gaming expert, both with the games themselves and in testing accessories and consoles, having flexed that expertise at Pocket-lint as a features editor. He has tested all manner of tech too, from headphones and speakers to apps and software.

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By Lizzie Wilmot Published 29 June 24

IMAGES

Maiden Voyage (Official Trailer)
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Documentary Follows 'Maiden' Voyage by Women's Sailing Crew
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COMMENTS

'Maiden' Documentary Tracks All-Female Crew Who 'Sailed Into The ...
Edwards and her 12-woman crew restored an old racing yacht, which they christened Maiden, and finished the nine-month race second in their class. Now, a new documentary, Maiden, retraces their voyage.
'Maiden' Review: An Inspiring Voyage with an All-Female ...
Read Matt Goldberg's Maiden review; Alex Holmes' documentary centers on the first all-female yacht crew to sail around the world in the Whitbread Race.
Maiden
Maiden is the story of how Tracy Edwards, a 24-year-old cook in charter boats, became the skipper of the first ever all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Ro...
Maiden Voyage streaming: where to watch online?
Currently you are able to watch "Maiden Voyage" streaming on The Roku Channel, Tubi TV, Freevee for free with ads. Synopsis A former firefighter and Special Forces officer takes on a team of murderous terrorists when the oceanliner he's working on is hijacked shortly after leaving port.
The King, the Sailor, and the Open Sea: the Remarkable True Story of Maiden
Maiden, the eponymous documentary by Alex Holmes, out Friday, chronicles an intense 167 days at sea, wrought in '80s pastels, frothy blue seas, and a whole lot of silver trophies. The crew of 14 ...
Maiden (film)
Maiden is a 2018 British documentary written and directed by Alex Holmes about Tracy Edwards and the crew of the Maiden as they compete as the first all-woman crew in the 1989-1990 Whitbread Round the World Race. The film was produced by Victoria Gregory's New Black Films.
Maiden movie review & film summary (2019)
Maiden is a moving documentary about the first all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Around the World Challenge in 1989. It features interviews with the skipper Tracy Edwards and her crew, as well as archival footage of their historic voyage and the challenges they faced.
Watch Maiden
In the male-dominated sport of yacht racing, skipper Tracy Edwards leads the first all-female crew in a famous race around the world. Watch trailers & learn more.
Maiden
In 1989 Tracy Edwards leads the first all-female crew in the Whitbread Round the World Race, a grueling yachting competition that covers 33,000 miles and lasts nine months. Director Alex Holmes ...
'Maiden': Groundbreaking 1989 Sailing Race For All-Female Crew
A new documentary tells the story of the first all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Round the World sailing race in 1989. The crew was led by a 24-year-old and the boat was called Maiden.
Review: 'Maiden' revisits a heart-stopping all-female voyage
A potent documentary about 1989's first all-women crew to compete in yachting's grueling Whitbread Round The World Race, at 32,000 plus miles the longest contest on earth, "Maiden" (also ...
With An All-Female Crew, 'Maiden' Sailed Around The World And Into
GROSS: We're listening to the interview Dave Davies recorded with Tracy Edwards. In 1989, she became the first woman to lead an all-female sailing crew on the Whitbread Round the World Race. That voyage is the subject of the new documentary "Maiden." After a break, we'll talk about the dangers and the extremes the crew faced during the race.
The captain of the Maiden talks about how her all-female yachting crew
During a recent visit to Los Angeles, Edwards and Holmes talked about the voyage of the Maiden and the movie. Advertisement Are there are a lot of female crews racing boats in England since your ...
'Maiden': The tense story of seawomen who braved the waves and the
Documentary recalls the first time an all-female crew competed in a round-the-world yacht race. Tracy Edwards (center) steers her yacht during the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Race, the subject ...
'Maiden': The must-see documentary about women who ...
The documentary Maiden captures the story of yacht skipper Tracey Edwards and her female crew that dared to face a storm of sexism and make the world's ocean their stage.. This inspirational film, produced by New Black Films and available on Netflix, transports viewers to 1989 using original footage taken on board the yacht "Maiden" and media coverage of the Whitbread Round the World Race.
'Maiden' Film Review: Extraordinary Women Buck the Odds, Sail Around
The movie's synth-heavy score builds up the drama of the story's energetic and daring notes. You can often catch it playing during the '80s newsreels and the old-school camcorder footage.
The Real-LIfe Story Behind Maiden Starring Tracy Edwards
These Women Sailed Across The World To Prove Men Wrong. Tracy Edwards, the real-life star of the new documentary, Maiden, made history helming the first all-female crew ever to sail across the world. July 3, 2019. 138. By Kristen Wong. The new documentary Maiden is now playing in select theaters, such as the Angelika Film Center in New York City.
Review: Lovely And Inspiring Documentary 'Maidentrip ...
The pared-back approach allows the story, and Laura's adventurous spirit shine through, in the good times and the bad, in stormy weather and in the doldrums. "Maidentrip" ends up being not ...
"Sailing Was About Freedom": The Gripping True Story of the Maiden
Why Netflix's Fyre Documentary Didn't Interview Billy McFarland "He said that he had an offer for $250,000 to film with someone else," director Chris Smith told V.F. "It just felt ...
'Maiden' Review: Racing Toward Equality
Alex Holmes's documentary about a yachting race revisits the ocean terrors and corrosive sexism faced by an all-woman crew. The documentary "Maiden" tells the story of an all-female crew ...
'Maiden,' sailing documentary featuring all-female crew ...
"Maiden," a new documentary from director Alex Holmes, tells the story of sailing pioneer Tracy Edwards navigating the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Race with an all-female crew.
MAIDEN
May 5, 1990 Ft. Lauderdale to Southampton 3,818 miles Despite low wind, Maiden regains some time in this leg. When Rucanor is stuck on a sand bank off the coast of England Maiden is just behind her.L'Esprit de Liberté wins the leg and the overall race in Division D with Maiden second and Rucanor placing third. But for the thousands of spectators on shore and the swarm of yachts and dinghies ...
Maidentrip (2013)
Maidentrip: Directed by Jillian Schlesinger. With Dick Dekker, Kim Dekker, Laura Dekker, Barbara Mueller. 14-year-old Laura Dekker sets out on a two-year voyage in pursuit of her dream to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone.
Hidden-gem documentary with ultra-rare 98% on Rotten Tomatoes is ...
News; Tech; Hidden-gem documentary with ultra-rare 98% on Rotten Tomatoes is leaving Netflix. Maiden is one of those rare highly-rated documentaries that everyone should watch, whether interested ...

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