Cole Brauer: Around The World With 500,000 Friends

There are few more extreme ways to isolate yourself from humanity than solo circumnavigating. For months on end, no matter the emotional and physical challenge presented at any moment, there’s no one to lend a hand, listen, offer comfort, or bolster courage. Through radio checks and satellite transceivers, offshore racers can stay in daily touch with race organizers, personal shoreside weather routers, and their support team with brief messages. But other than that, singlehanders have been on their own out there, and the rest of us have had little idea what they go through.

All that changed when 29-year-old Cole Brauer crossed the starting line of the Global Solo Challenge (GSC) on October 29, 2023. A relative unknown, she was considered a long shot in this round-the-world race – the youngest skipper in the 16-boat fleet, one of only a few Americans, and the only woman. When she finished the grueling marathon four months later, navigating some of the most challenging capes, storms, and weather conditions in the world, she became the first American woman to sail solo nonstop around the world while amassing an astonishing 500,000 people following her on social media. Sailing has never seen such a phenomenon.

All-American girl

After growing up on New York’s Long Island, Brauer attended the University of Hawaii to major in food science and nutrition. She fell in love with sailing, joined the sailing team, spent her 20s following boat jobs wherever they led her, and earned her 100-ton Master’s license. Living out of her van, she taught sailing in Boothbay, Maine, worked yacht deliveries around the Atlantic, and raced out of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, sometimes traveling to Europe and the Caribbean for seasonal paid gigs. She was first noticed as a ping on the boating world’s radar when she and Cat Chimney won the Bermuda One-Two in the summer of 2023 – a there-and-back race between Newport, Rhode Island, and the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda 635 miles to the east – becoming the first all-women’s team to do so.

Despite that success, Brauer struggled to find support for her more ambitious goals. She wanted to race around the world before she turned 30, but at 5-foot-2 was told she was “too small” to withstand the unforgiving Southern Ocean and got turned down as crew in The Ocean Race.

Luckily the owners of First Light, the Class 40 boat she and Chimney had sailed in the Bermuda One-Two, encouraged her to launch her own round-the-world campaign and offered their First Light to be her platform. By then, a new race had entered the scene, the GSC, whose organizers wanted to create an event between the ultra-expensive and elite Vendée Globe – which is competed solo on 60-foot high-performance racing machines, requires extensive prequalifying events and is nearly impossible to enter without big-name sponsorships – and the Golden Globe, raced by amateurs in modest production boats designed before 1988.

GSC was conceived to occupy the void in the middle, allowing professionals and amateurs aboard boats ranging from 30-something-foot cruisers to high-performance Class 40s, like Brauer’s, and beyond. Competition would be leveled by using a pursuit start, in which different boats start on different dates based on their projected speeds, slower boats first, fastest last.

“I’d always wanted to sail around the world before I turned 30. I didn’t specifically want to do it on my own, but if no one was going to take a chance on me, I was going to have to go alone and prove them wrong,” said Brauer.

She entered the GSC.

When Brauer crossed the finish line in A Coruña, Spain, 130 days and some 30,000 miles later, she more than achieved her goal. The first American woman to sail solo nonstop around the world finished second overall and broke a speed record, shaving seven days off the previous round-the-world record for Class 40 boats. Seemingly, out of nowhere, she had catapulted to the world podium.

Just as remarkable, perhaps, is what she achieved before crossing the finish line – attracting an audience of half a million fans – sailors and nonsailors alike – inspired by her project and cheering her on along the way. According to Lydia Mullan, Brauer’s media manager, “Cole didn’t set out to become a celebrity.” And yet, “It only took a few weeks to realize her account was a runaway train. Our shore team checked in every day to note the latest sailor she’d surpassed in followers … and then there was no one left. We couldn’t find a single competitive sailor, campaign, or class with a bigger Instagram following than Cole.”

Mullan also kept a close eye on the demographics of those followers. There appeared to be two predominant groups: “Women her age and men her parents’ age – the people who saw themselves in her, and the people who were most surprised to see someone like her doing what she was doing.”

Lessons in communication

An estimated 648 million Instagram accounts have more than 500,000 followers, but Cole Brauer is the only sailor in that crowd – a feat considering there are a million and one other ventures vying for our limited attention, and sailing doesn’t draw crowds like it used to. The sport can be confusing, not easily lending itself to short-form content, and a competition that takes place thousands of miles offshore provides little opportunity for spectating, save post-race footage and documentaries frequently depicting misery and misfortune.

“You see people in these races and they’re always so serious. They’re exhausted, they’re miserable,” Brauer said, “What’s the point in having an adventure like this if you’re not going to enjoy it?”

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Brauer’s photogenic face was popping up on Instagram every morning, with her hair pulled back, nails polished in white, and a sunny, “Good morning, guys!” greeting. No matter what she was experiencing out there – from the sublime to the terrifying – Brauer looked like she was enjoying almost all of it.

A modern, interactive travelogue

Nearly every day for four months, powered by a phone, some onboard cameras, a Starlink connection, and an at-times rationed electrical supply, Brauer greeted her fans and brought them around the world with her, sharing life aboard First Light in near-real time. Starlink was the game-changer. The global mobile broadband satellite service has given transoceanic travelers the ability to not only share brief messages and receive weather data, but also to upload videos and interact with others online from nearly anywhere on the planet, at speeds comparable to shoreside Wi-Fi. Brauer harnessed that technology for everything it was worth.

“Happy Halloween!” she cheerily started her daily update on October 31, 2023, from a phone angled for a selfie-style video, eclectic plastic pumpkins swaying from the cabin ceiling.

“I didn’t bring a costume, I felt like my foulies were a good-enough costume to play a sailor. … Yesterday was terrible. Not for the boat, mostly for me. I woke up … needing to puke. I’ve never had seasickness before in my life, but I just kept puking and puking.”

In the background, the cacophony of First Light’s hull slamming and bouncing through the waves illuminated her point.

The next day, a severely dehydrated Brauer had to give herself a saline IV to replenish her fluids. She showed everything but the needle entering her arm, breaking down step by step what each component does and how it’s used. A commenter cheered, “Beast mode! Ocean sailors hope they rarely have to open up the med kit … but you do it like a pro!”

As things looked up after a rocky start, Brauer joyfully adjusted and readjusted her sails wearing denim shorts and a sports bra as First Light ripped downwind. Then she panned a different camera across the bow, showing off her beloved “Big Red” headsail, enormous waves, and seafoam zipping past. Mark Ambor’s upbeat “Good To Be” provided the soundtrack.

“I didn’t realize Helly Hansen made cut-off shorts,” wrote one commenter. “This is the sailing content we all needed but didn’t know existed! Rooting for you!” said another. A young girl wrote simply, “I want to be you when I grow up.”

It’s not all about the sailing. In one video Brauer showed us lifelines full of fresh laundry while she inspected the deck with a towel wrapped around her head.

“Wait, what?! I am still on my first pair of clothes,” commented one of her competitors; Brauer responded with laughing emojis.

In another, she made herself French-pressed coffee, awash in golden early morning light. In yet another, while she performed countless controlled pull-ups on a bar suspended from the cabin ceiling, a sound bite from a podcast played in the background: “Do you know how many pull-ups, statistically, a woman can do?” the male podcast host droned, “Zero.”

A great teacher in her element

Rolling south through the Atlantic, Brauer interspersed fun with substantive talk about the realities of life as a singlehanded racer. She explained when things went wrong and why in clear, plain language, like when an autopilot failure resulted in First Light’s suddenly out-of-control rudder swinging the boat around, allowing the stiff breeze to force it down onto its side, called a broach.

She started “Tracker Tuesdays,” updating where she was relative to the rest of the widespread fleet, her fellow competitors staying in friendly contact with each other.

On “Sail Stack Saturdays” she explained each sail and what it’s used for, and “Shore Team Sundays” were for crediting her behind-the-scenes support team of mostly young, up-and-coming contracted professionals with expertise in weather routing, rigging, and everything in between.

As Brauer sailed deeper into the race, closer to the Southern Ocean, some of her posts increased in gravity as conditions became violent, so much so that on December 4, with First Light battling a heavy sea state, Brauer’s mounted camera in the cabin captured a wild scene. A freak wave broke across the boat at a bad angle, First Light broached 90 degrees onto her side and stayed there, and Brauer flew through the air, full-body slamming into the opposite wall, an avalanche of gear tumbling behind her.

Luckily, her injuries weren’t debilitating, other than badly bruised ribs and soreness for a few days. But the tiredness in her voice led some viewers to fear otherwise.

“Never lose respect for the ocean, that’s for sure,” she concluded

Highs and lows

Brauer continued to show her highest highs – hoisting herself up the 65-foot-tall mast for a rig inspection, arms opened at the top as she soaked in the sun and panned the camera to show us the endless sea for miles around, making the workout of the century look like a breeze. And her lowest lows – tears rolling down her cheeks recounting her emotional first weeks at sea: “It’s been amazing, it’s been hard, I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, I’ve screamed, yelled, puked. I’m just so unbelievably grateful that I get to do this!”

High: Brauer decorates First Light for Christmas, pinning a felt tree to the cabin wall with an ear-to-ear grin, and opening a present from her parents – pajamas!

Low: Endless self-steering gear problems, and then learning friend and competitor Ari Känsäkoski of Finland loses his mast. Brauer describes the event as “devastating” while choking back tears. A downed mast left Känsäkoski with little choice but to jury rig something, anything, to allow him to sail 2,500 nautical miles to the nearest shore.

High: Brauer dances in the New Year in a pink dress, wielding an inflatable palm tree, and swinging around a head lamp to create her own private rave.

Low: Her hydrogenerator, essentially a propeller that spins through the water while sailing to produce power aboard, is faltering. Brauer attempts to repair it, but it continues to break down in new ways every time she gets it running. She must ration energy consumption for the remainder of the voyage.

High: Brauer surfs into the Pacific, salty, wet hair flying, ecstatically soaking in the vast seascape.

Low: As she approaches Cape Horn, storm systems chase her through the world’s most infamously demanding passage. Deep gray clouds roll overhead and 30-foot waves threaten to crash over the transom at any moment.

Every day, high and low, crest and trough, excitement and terror. Brauer displays intimacy and vulnerability from the most extreme corner of a centuries-old sport that has for so long been characterized by solitude and machismo. In the most remote corners of the globe, while her solo forebears gazed into the abyss with albatrosses for confidants, in a euphoric moment Brauer dances on deck to Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” and we were there with her.

As the miles racked up, so did her followers. Brauer’s first in-race Instagram post garnered around 3,000 likes. When she rounded Cape Horn on January 26, 2024, a photo of her holding up a whiteboard with the date, time, and location reeled in 65,000. A Valentine’s Day video of First Light humming along while Brauer, in pink shorts, pink headphones, and wraparound sunglasses, poured her heart and soul into an on-deck dance party, amassed 146,000 and went viral across other platforms. For maybe the first time, a solo racer synthesized the magic recipe of vulnerability, fireball energy, true competence, sincerity, and enormous charisma, pulling us deep into her world.

Rounding the corner

As Brauer returned to the Atlantic on her homeward leg, her tone changed. She happily commented on the little things – the familiar pattern of the waves, the smell of spring that reminded her of a New England childhood, the cloud formations that left her in awe even after months at sea. Only the monotony of the doldrums, the exasperating lifelessness of the sails, rigging slatting back and forth in the absence of wind, dampened her mood for a few tedious days of zero progress. Then, when the wind returned, she cheerily sipped an Aperol spritz and didn’t want the race to end.

In the early hours of March 7, Brauer crossed the finish line, a half-million friends in tow. First-place finisher Phillippe Delamare greeted her dockside, along with her parents, to hand her the trophy. 

“He gave me the cup and said, ‘I look at you and see that you are the next generation of sailor,’ and that’s really the only time I started to cry.”

First American woman to sail solo nonstop around the world via the Great Capes? Check. Ascending into the spotlight of a sport that has seemed to be for only the elite, and inviting everyone to the party? Check. Galvanizing a media rippling effect sure to alter future expectations in communications and sponsorships in competitive sailing? Check. What’s next? Down time with family and friends for sure. Maybe, just maybe, the Vendée Globe. Cole Brauer is just getting started.