Cole Brauer picked up sailing in college, then sailed around the world alone
Last year, the sailor circumnavigated the planet in 130 solitary days—part of her effort to draw more women and young people to a sometimes stuffy sport.
Cole Brauer didn’t grow up going to a yacht club, and neither did her parents. They were into triathlons, while she played soccer, ran track, and had a stint as a cheerleader. It was only as a 19-year-old college transfer student, living off campus in a Honolulu high-rise and struggling to meet people, that the idea hit. Her building was close to the water, and in a sliver of ocean view, Brauer could see sailboats slicing back and forth. She thought, Maybe there’s a sailing club I can join. “I just Googled ‘sailing, Hawaii,’ and one of the things that popped up was the University of Hawaii sailing team,” she says.
Through a combination of athleticism, instinct, and sheer chutzpah, Brauer talked her way onto the competitive college team. By her junior year, she was a captain. “I just kept showing up,” Brauer, now 30, says. “I have that type of mentality where you just run at that wall as hard as you can … I sailed everything I could, as much as I could.” A decade later, after scraping her way into a postcollegiate racing career, she became the first American woman to sail solo around the world, nonstop and unassisted.
“She’s so talented; it’s not something that anyone can do,” says Hannah Stowe, a professional sailor and author of the acclaimed memoir Move Like Water. The physical, mental, and logistical demands one faces in the deep ocean can be difficult to understand for those who haven’t been there before. “These are actually mountains of water, and they’re coming at you pretty hard, and there’s no get-out,” says Stowe. “It’s constant management, all the time, of yourself, of your boat.”
Brauer completed her around-the-world sail last year in an annual competition that takes contestants around what are known in the nautical world as the three great capes: South America’s Cape Horn, Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, and Australia’s Cape Leeuwin. She set out in her 40-foot boat, First Light, from the northwest coast of Spain on October 29, 2023, and returned there just after sunrise on March 7, 2024, after 130 days alone at sea. In the process, she placed second in the race—of 16 sailors who started, only seven finished—and set a new speed record for her vessel class. “I didn’t see another competitor the entire time,” she says. “Your racecourse is so big. It’s not like they’re right next to you and you’re like, Oh, hi!” Along with loneliness, she battled physical injuries like cracked ribs after being thrown across the boat—“Strap it up and move on,” she says—and the often damp, cold monotony of life at sea. Brauer had satellite internet on board and, she says, “I finished Netflix.”
These days, when Brauer isn’t racing, she works with groups like Rocking the Boat, a New York–based organization in the Bronx that introduces young people to sailing and helps them finish high school. She’s also inspiring more women to take up the sport. When she set out from Spain, Brauer had about 10,000 Instagram followers, 85 percent of whom were men—pretty standard for a male-dominated sport. She finished the race with roughly 500,000 followers, and by then the demographics had shifted: Half of her audience was now female. Inspiring others matters to Brauer, who wants to demonstrate what’s possible for women—and for people who didn’t grow up around yachts.
