[powerpress]
What does it take to race a sailboat solo around the world?
How do you break into a sport that wasn’t made for you? And what are we not seeing in the clouds that could help guide our lives?
Cole Brauer has spent the better part of a decade living her way into these answers.
Raised in East Hampton, Cole grew up in the working-class community that keeps the coastal elite running, one world adjacent to the other but not quite part of it. She studied photojournalism in Savannah, then nutrition in Hawaii, where the Polynesian sailing community took her in and taught her to treat sailing as an art form.
For years, she worked as a boat captain and préparateur, and learned along the way that men her age, some with less experience, were being paid three times what she was. Then she got a boat of her own. In 2023, she won both legs of the Bermuda 1-2, the first woman to win either. That October, she set out on a 130-day race, sailing First Light roughly 27,000 nautical miles to become the first American woman to race solo, nonstop around the globe.
Somewhere between the doldrums and Cape Horn, Cole got back something most of us have long since lost: the ability to read the sky. She listened to the boat and trusted her body. Her story, back on land, is a reminder that this is who we are.
Cole documented the race daily on Instagram, from injuries and emotional breakdowns to dance parties for one, upending the alpha male stereotype of professional ocean racing for a following that grew to roughly 450,000. Her new book, First Light: Sailing Solo but Not Alone, is a love story to the boat that carried her.
This conversation covers:
- The Insular Language & Legacy of Sailing
- An Underground Fight Club & Anger as Fuel
- The Dragon Time Mindset
- Three Strikes: Young, Small & a Woman
- Starlink, Stuffed Animals & Storytelling at Sea
- Cracked Ribs, Failed Autopilots & Hell Week
- Fidelity to the Vessel & the Drake Passage Decision
- Why Land Feels Like Foreign Territory
- It’s Okay to Fail: A Message to Young Women
For those who prefer a visual experience, the conversation is available on YouTube. As always, the audio version streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Peace + Plants,
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