Laura Dekker is across the Atlantic

by Nancy Knudsen on 20 Dec 2010 Three months after departing Europe Laura Dekker, 15-year-old Dutch cruising sailor, has arrived on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten after sailing the Atlantic in 17 days from the Cape Verde Islands in her Jeanneau Gin Fizz ketch, Guppy. She arrived after dark at the end of the 2200 nautical mile crossing, having experienced excellent winds during the last couple of days.

This is not the longest leg of her circumnavigation. The longest leg for the cruising sailor is the leg between the Galapagos and the Marquesas. There are no convenient stopping places between these two remote Pacific archipelagoes, and the journey normally takes around 21 days.

Laura experienced every kind of wind in the crossing, from being almost becalmed to boisterous seas. When almost at the end of her voyage her steering vane broke off in the seas, and Laura was obliged to replace it with another one, a difficult job in a choppy sea, reaching from the swim platform to do the job underwater.

While very young to have achieved this crossing unassisted, she is not the youngest. British sailor Michael Perham completed the crossing while still aged 14 on the 3rd January, 2007. At the time his father sailed the Atlantic on another boat at the same time. He still holds the record as the youngest sailor to make such a crossing.

Laura's anticipated round world journey will take her two years.

She will follow the equatorial route of many cruising sailors, sailing during the cruising seasons in order to avoid the hurricanes and cyclones in the Pacific and the Indian Oceans.

She will now remain in the Caribbean for some time, until going through the Panama Canal on her way to the Pacific.

Laura and her father, Dick Dekker, fought the Dutch children's authorities for two years to allow her to undertake her round world voyage. The young sailor was born on her parents' boat in New Zealand when they were sailing their own circumnavigation, and sailed the English Channel alone at the age of 13. On arrival in Britain, when authorities found out how old she was, they put her in a children's home until her father came to collect her. He took her back to the shore and she sailed home to the Netherlands again, solo.