An Irish woman has reached land after sailing across the Atlantic solo as part of a “low-technology” race.
At around 6pm, Dubliner Gráinne Costigan had “just finished” the Mini Transat 2025 competition which took her from France to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean via the Canary Islands, her mother Gerardine Costigan confirmed.
While approaching land, Gráinne danced a jig from inside her boat.
Gráinne Costigan is the first Irish woman to make the crossing in the Mini Transat 6.5, a six and a half metre boat.
RM Block
However, even she is “reluctant” to say she is the first Irish woman to sail the Atlantic solo as she is not sure, explained her sister Meadhbh Costigan.
“I’m delighted she is in, it’s something she has always wanted to do,” her mother said.
“I had great faith in her, it’s a great achievement.”
The competition, first created in 1977, has almost 100 people competing to cross the Atlantic Oceanon small sailboats with limited technical means.
While competing, Costigan is allowed no contact with the outside world.
“She has to do all her own meteorology and navigation herself,” her sister said. “It’s a low-technology race and they do that to lower the bar for entry. They get one broadcast of weather a day and they have to use that to decide how to navigate. They watch the horizon for cloud build-up so, it’s quite old school.”
Costigan grew up in a sailing family, on the coast in Sutton, Co Dublin, with her family home overlooking the sea. Her father had a 25-foot yacht called “Freya” that she and her sister went out on as children.
She began to build the skills required for the race at an early age. From the age of eight, she attended summer sailing school at Sutton Dinghy Club and later Howth Yacht Club. She started studying meteorology and navigation from the age of 10 or 11.
After spending the last four years training and qualifying for the event, she left the port at Les Sables d’Olonne in France on September 20th.
In preparation for the competition, she had sailed around the likes of Azores Islands and the Mediterranean solo.
“She has a lot of experience in that boat now and you just have to trust someone that they know what they’re doing,” said her sister.
A week in, she had to make an emergency stop in Leixões, Portugal due to the cancellation of the first leg of the race due to tropical storm Gabrielle, which caused widespread damage in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean.
She left there on September 29th and landed at La Palma in the Canary Islands on October 10th.
After a rest period, on October 25th, she set out for Guadeloupe where she finished the race, a crossing of 4,050 nautical miles on her boat called Sea Fever after the James Mansfield poem.
Gráinne has funded herself. The boat alone cost €50,000 second-hand.
Her sister explained that sailors go down south to the Cape Verde Islands, where they hit the trade winds which blow the boats across the Atlantic. She has been travelling across the Atlantic Ocean at a speed of five nautical miles an hour.
Meadhbh likened the boat to “a large dinghy.” There are no facilities on board such as a shower or toilet. She has to take bucket showers and naps whenever she can.
She has been helping Gráinne by posting updates from her GoPro video camera to YouTube and social media, allowing people to follow her journey.
She described her sister as “an amazing woman. There’s no stopping her. She’s kind of fierce.”
Around the coast of Galicia, sailors became concerned about orcas as a number lost their rudders to attacks.
Meadhbh, her brother and her mother went to see Gráinne at Les Sables d’Olonne and La Palma and her mother met her when she completed the race at Guadeloupe to “support her as best as we can”.
Gráinne works as a data scientist for the pharmaceutical industry and lives in Barcelona, Spain where will she will return to on December 1st after three months off work.
Her sister explained that she is “big into representation. Women in science and sailing, both professions can be male-dominated, but she’s all for seeing women do it.”
After completing the race, she will spend a week in Guadeloupe to recover and celebrate with her fellow sailors.
Her next dream is to participate in the Vendée Globe, a solo circumnavigation of the globe.
