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Ellen MacArthur: 'I can't live with the sea any more'
The round the world record holder explains why she has turned her back on the sea to crusade for the planet.
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Elizabeth Grice By Elizabeth Grice6:56AM BST 31 Aug 2010
Nothing mattered more to Ellen MacArthur than the sea, unless it was being the fastest person on its surface. It was her element, the great obsession from childhood. With the boats that took her round the world, she had a kind of symbiotic union. They worked as one. And when she was back on land, everyday life felt trivial, people pressed in too much, and she soon wanted to be out on the ocean again, testing herself against the elements even in places that had nearly destroyed her.
At the end of her Vendee Globe triumph in 2001, she took me down into the tiny, unventilated cabin of Kingfisher on a “tour” of the quarters which had been her cell, home, work station and survival-capsule for 94 days. She talked about the meticulous planning that had gone into provisioning her nutshell of a boat; how she worked out, to the last perforation, exactly how many kitchen rolls she would need.
Preparation was everything, she said. Proudly, she showed off her unappetising stash of foil-wrapped, freeze-dried food, the tiny one-foot gas stove, the neatly hanging polythene bags of medical supplies and rations – of which days 95-110 were untouched because she had got home so fast. Her housekeeping was as formidable as her sailing
This image of her, fussing over what went where, in a space where she had been “so happy”, yet which anywhere else would have been condemned as unfit for human habitation, sprung to mind as she explained why she is giving up competitive sailing to find ways of conserving the earth’s limited resources.
The boat was her world and she looked after it because her life depended on it. Now, she sees the world as a boat: a small, beautiful, damageable entity whose supplies are running out. “I wasn’t looking for this,” she pleads. “I didn’t want to leave sailing. I just couldn’t imagine it. I never thought it would stop for a second. I was even thinking of building a boat for the Vendée Globe 2008.”
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