Remember the time

When Kay Cottee sailed into Sydney Harbour on June 5, 1988, she was surprised by the number of boats with sailors partying. “Why are they here?” she asked her friend.: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about, I just went out for a sail.” It was quite a sail. Kay had just become the first woman to sail single-handed, nonstop around the world. She’d sailed 35,566km at an average speed of 188km per day, spending 189 days at sea without once touching land – all this in a yacht (Blackmores First Lady) that she’d built herself. “The worst night in the entire voyage,” Kay told the ABC, “was off the Cape of Good Hope [in South Africa], which is known as the cape of storms. It was totally out of control with three sails up and I nearly lost my life three times that night.” On one of those occasions, Kay was washed off the boat and dragged underneath the hull. She celebrated her arrival in the Indian Ocean with some galley-baked bread, crab and a bottle of Grange Hermitage. Born in Sydney’s Sans Souci on Botany Bay, Kay’s first outing on a boat was at just a few weeks old, and she’s loved the ocean ever since. Her extraordinary grit, courage and creativity were acknowledged when she became Australian of the Year in 1988. She spent the following years studying fine arts, raising money for charity and inspiring young women sailors. Kay now lives in the NSW coastal town of Yamba, where she and her husband, Peter Sutton, run a marina and she paints, sculpts and, of course, still sails. Would she go out on the sea again with 100-knot winds and 20-metre waves? “I can tell you, your life does flash before your eyes,” she told . “But I survived it and I’d do it again at the drop of a hat.”