Tropic Sprockets / Maiden

Tropic Sprockets / Maiden

By Ian Brockway

The ocean is a sublime and dangerous force that has inspired great works of philosophy, film and literature. Poe, Melville, the Surrealist Isadore Ducasse, and Hemingway have all featured the ocean in their novels. As an element, water is the source of all life, but taken in its entirety the ocean is unforgiving, harsh, unsentimental and even predatory.

“Maiden” is a documentary by Alex Holmes about Tracy Edwards’ battle with oceanic nature and her absolute determination to form the first all-female crewed yacht to sail in the Whitebread Around-the-World yacht race.

Edwards was born in England. As a teen, her father died unexpectedly. Now with a stepfather, her family moved to Wales. The stepfather was horribly abusive, causing Edwards to rebel and run away. Nothing interested her. But she was captivated by the romance of the sea and the supposed anarchist life of a sailor. Edwards became a ship’s cook. Then she wanted to sail around the world.

Most every sailor patronized and laughed at the women and the media was unkind. Edwards was undaunted.

But by chance she met King Hussein I of Jordan who told her not to give up. He became a sponsor. As Edwards had mortgaged her house to buy a battered yacht, the sponsor was the final thing she needed. In 1989, Maiden joined the Whitbread, putting her at sea for nine months.

This documentary is an adventure story. The ocean itself is a vast rolling and carnivorous mountain with aquatic teeth ready to kill. The women had the strength of warrior Amazons. This was not given though supernatural means; the power the sailors had was existentially self-created by their own resources. Each of them created their luck through the agency of Will.

The team battles the great Leviathan known as the sea, witnessing a watery hell, and a paradise, only to have paradise dissolve into so much salt spray. Still they proceed.

The fun of the film (in light of Time’s Up) comes from the incredulous whiskered males, the journalists and how sincerely backward they were. Most now know—and some of us have never forgotten—that women are just as strong as men, if not more so.

Winning two of the six legs in the notorious 1989 race, Edwards was awarded Yachtsman of the Year.

The end of “Maiden” is as apprehensive as any psychological thriller full of paranoia and circumstances beyond human control, while the final seconds will without a doubt move you to tears.

Tracy Edwards not only conquered the roil of the sea and its formless motion but she subverted pompous male-dominated beliefs, turning them into stagnant water, brackish and stale.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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