WFlorence Arthaud was a French sailor from Boulogne-Billancourt. She was the daughter of Jacques Arthaud, director of the Arthaud publishing house.
WHoward Blackburn (1859–1932) was a Canadian American fisherman. Despite losing his fingers and toes to frostbite while lost at sea in a dory in 1883, he prospered as a Gloucester, Massachusetts businessman. Yearning for adventure, he twice sailed single-handed across the Atlantic Ocean, overcoming his disability and setting record times for the crossing.
WSteven Callahan is an American author, naval architect, inventor, and sailor. In 1981, he survived for 76 days adrift on the Atlantic Ocean in a liferaft. Callahan recounted his ordeal in the best-selling book Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea (1986), which was on The New York Times best-seller list for more than 36 weeks.
WFranck Cammas is a French yachtsman. He has lived in Brittany since his victory in the Challenge Espoir Crédit Agricole in 1994. After completing a two-year maths course for the ‘Grandes écoles’, as well as a piano academy, Franck Cammas finally opted for a career in sailing. In 1997, at the age of 24, he won the Solitaire du Figaro and a year later helmed his first trimaran christened Groupama. Despite his late entry into competition, he is one of the most talented and respected sailors in the Ocean Racing Multihull Association world.
WRobert Allen "Bob" Case was a meteorologist who worked for the National Weather Service (NWS) for 28 years. Over the course of his career, he worked in NWS various offices, developing a diverse background in various types of weather forecasting, including a lengthy stint as a hurricane forecaster. He is best known for inspiring the naming of the 1991 Perfect Storm as The Perfect Storm.
WDavid Scott Cowper is a British yachtsman, and was the first man to sail solo round the world in both directions and was also the first to successfully sail around the world via the Northwest Passage single-handed.
WFrank Cowper was an English yachtsman and author who was highly influential in popularising single-handed cruising. He has been credited as "the forefather of modern cruising", and his books "laid the foundation" of the pilot guides used by yachtsmen today. As an author he also saw some commercial success with a number of published adventure and romance novels.
WDonald Charles Alfred Crowhurst was a British businessman and amateur sailor who died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Soon after he started the race his ship began taking on water and he wrote that it would probably sink in heavy seas. He secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually doing so. His ship's logbooks, found after his disappearance, suggest that the stress he was under and associated psychological deterioration may have led to his suicide.
WJamie Barry Dunross, OAM is an Australian sailor who won a gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Paralympics.
WAmbrogio Fogar was an Italian sailor, writer, rally driver and all-round adventurer and television presenter. He was a Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, gold medal for athletic value, gold medal for marine value, gold medal to memory and other.
WClare Mary Francis MBE is a British novelist who was first known for her career as a yachtswoman who has twice sailed across the Atlantic on her own and she was the first woman to captain a successful boat on the Whitbread Around the World race.
WArthur Jones, pen name Tristan Jones was a British mariner and author. He spent most of his life at sea, first in the British Royal Navy, and then sailing in small yachts for various purposes, including self-appointed adventure trips. Starting in 1977, he wrote sixteen books and many articles about sailing and his adventures, including several memoirs. His writing, while highly entertaining, often mixes fact and fiction. In his memoirs, he invented a fictional childhood and youth.
WKang Dong-suk is a yachtsman and adventurer from South Korea.
WCommander William Donald Aelian King, DSO & Bar, DSC was a British naval officer, yachtsman and author. He was the oldest participant in the first solo non-stop, around-the-world yacht race, the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, and the only person to command a British submarine on both the first and last days of World War II.
WAmyr Klink is a Brazilian explorer, sailor and writer. One of his projects, "Antarctica 360", was circumnavigating the Antarctic continent on his own, in 88 days between 1998 and 1999.
WArmel Le Cléac’h is a French professional navigator and sea captain. He was the IMOCA world champion in 2008 and French champion in single-handed yacht race in 2003, he notably won the Solitaire du Figaro twice, the Transat AG2R in 2004 and 2010 and the Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race in 2016. He finished second in both the 2008–09 and 2012–13 editions of the Vendée Globe. In the Vendée Globe 2016–17, he finished first with a new record time of 74d 3h 35' 46". His performance earned him the 2018 Laureus World Sports Award for Action Sportsperson of the Year.
WRobert Manry was a copy editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer who in 1965 sailed from Falmouth, Massachusetts, to Falmouth, Cornwall, England, in a tiny 13.5-foot (4.1 m) sailboat named Tinkerbelle. Beginning on June 1, 1965, and ending on August 17, the voyage lasted 78 days.
WTom McClean is a veteran of both the Parachute Regiment and the SAS and is a survival expert who lived on the island of Rockall from 26 May to 4 July 1985 to affirm Britain's claim to it; this is the third longest human occupancy of the island, surpassed in 1997 by a team from Greenpeace which spent 42 days on the island, and in 2014 by Nick Hancock who spent 45 days there.
WAlex Pella is a Spanish yachtsman. In 2014 he became the first and only Spanish to win a transoceanic single-handed race, the Route du Rhum. Alex Pella made history once again, on the 26th of January 2017, when he broke, with the rest of the team, the absolute round-the-world speed sailing record, known as the Jules Verne Trophy., aboard the sophisticated maxi-multihull IDEC 3. They circumnavigated the planet in 40 days, 23 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds.
WBruno Tristan Peyron is a French yachtsman who, along with his crew on the catamaran Orange II, broke the outright round-the-world sailing record in March 2005. He was the first winner of the Jules Verne Trophy in 1994, for completing a round-the-world trip in less than 80 days. Peyron was born in Angers, France and grew up in the French Atlantic coast city of La Baule. He has been one of the main organisers behind the round-the-world-race, The Race.
WRobin John Popplestone was a pioneer in the fields of machine intelligence and robotics. He is known for developing the COWSEL and POP programming languages, and for his work on Freddy II with Pat Ambler at the University of Edinburgh Artificial Intelligence laboratory.
WFred Rebell was a Latvian born in Ventspils, Courland, Russian Empire, fled to Germany in 1907, and stowed away on a ship to Australia in 1909. In 1930, he decided to emigrate to the United States. Fred Rebell was not his original name but one he assumed when he forged seaman's papers to escape from Germany to Australia about 1907. Lacking a passport, he was unable to obtain a visa and decided to make his own way. He purchased an 18' sailing regatta yacht and sailed single-handed from Australia to Los Angeles starting around 1931. Lacking funds for navigation instruments, he made his own sextant from scrap parts including using a hacksaw blade as a degree scale. He did so with a self-created passport. He landed on various Pacific islands en route — spending as long as five months repairing his boat. He arrived in San Pedro, California, in 1933 and is recorded as the first ever solo crossing of the Pacific Ocean from west to east.
WJon Sanders is an Australian yachtsman.
WWilliam Reid Stowe is an American artist and mariner. Stowe grew up around sailboats on the East Coast, sailing on the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in his late teens and early twenties. By age 26, he had built two of his own sailboats with the help of his family and friends. Stowe subsequently sailed to the Antarctic with his schooner Anne in 1986 and completed a 194-day journey without touching land in 1999.
WÉric Marcel Guy Tabarly was a French Navy officer and yachtsman. He was a member of the Yacht Club de France.
WNigel Tetley was a British sailor who was the first person to circumnavigate the world solo in a trimaran.
WAlex Thomson is a British yachtsman.