Cruising: Soul Sailor

Photo by Brandon Doheny

Olivia Wyatt let go of the shore in the summer of 2019, a decision slow to arrive that was part obsession, part dare, and part promise to herself. She readied herself and her sailboat, a 34-foot Ta Shing Panda named Juniper, for a solo Pacific crossing from San Diego to Honolulu.

She was a relatively new boatowner—the 30-year-old, full-keel cutter was her first (if you don’t count her Sunfish, which she named Queequeg) and remains her only. Back then she was a relatively experienced sailor as something one studies, less so as something one does. She had sailed alone before, but only a sum of 36 nautical miles and six hours. She was admittedly afraid to sail alone, which is in large part why she finally let go of that shore.

She is today, four years later, a provisional entrant in the 2026 Golden Globe Race (GGR), one of four Americans and the only woman in the field thus far. The race takes competitors from Les Sables-d’Olonne and back via four rendezvous gates and the great capes of Good Hope, Leeuwin, and Horn, solo and nonstop. In total, Wyatt has now sailed 16,000 nautical miles, 9,000 of them solo, mostly in temperate Pacific waters. The longest she has spent at sea is 23 days. Finishing the Golden Globe will require eight to ten months at sea.

“I needed a bigger purpose than cruising from place to place,” she says. “I want there to be a bigger purpose for everything I do in life. I am the type of person that wants big things to sink my entire self into. I need to be consistently challenged and learning and exploring. And I love to be consumed by a goal, otherwise I get super bored.”

Wyatt, 41, a filmmaker, photographer, and writer, is presently most of the way across the Pacific, having meandered over the years aboard Juniper through the Hawaiian island chain, across the equator to French Polynesia, then to Fiji, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands, arriving there in September 2023.

She has already nearly met the minimum requirements of GGR entrants—8,000 miles in any boat, 2,000 solo, and 2,000 solo nonstop in the boat you intend to use. Because she didn’t use celestial navigation, she must repeat the latter qualifier, documenting at least six celestial observations and computed position lines. This year, she will sail to Malaysia for a refit before heading for the Med in 2025, either via the Indian Ocean and Cape of Good Hope, or shipping Juniper from Thailand to Europe. She plans a final refit in Portugal before the race start in Les Sables-d’Olonne.

The idea of doing the GGR struck last summer when Wyatt was in Vanuatu, anchored off Espiritu Santo. She was aware of the original 1968 Golden Globe but not of the recent reboot until the 2022-23 edition, which Kirsten Neuschäfer won in April 2023, becoming the first woman to win a solo round-the-world race. In addition to allowing only production boats between 32 and 36 feet, designed before 1988, with a full-length keel and rudder attached to their trailing edge, the one-of-its-kind, retro race requires sailors to navigate with sextant on paper charts and use no electronic instruments or autopilot.

“I was on full fire inside,” Wyatt says. “I woke up the next day unable to shake the idea of the race out of my head, but I didn’t know if I had what it takes to do it.”

She dug further into the details and soon discovered that the Baba 35, sister vessel to her own, was on the list of pre-approved designs. She already had the right boat. In a way she had been practicing for this race for the past four years.

She reached out to Neuschäfer and another 2022-23 GGR sailor, Elliott Smith—he dropped out of the race in Australia after his rig failed—and spoke to them by phone for hours, asking questions and soaking up advice. A few days later she spoke to race founder and chairman Don McIntyre and asked him if he thought she was ready.

“You’re already doing it,” he told her. “You’re already sailing around the world by yourself.”