Inspiration

lone voyager

aquatic adventurer Maud fontenoy puts COURAGE AND DETERMINATION above MUSCLE AND MIGHT

Maud Fontenoy was practically born to the life aquatic. Her parents apparently wanted their daughter to have sea legs before she could crawl, taking her on a sailing trip across the Atlantic when she was a mere seven days old. Fontenoy spent the first 15 years of her life more or less constantly at sea. “They showed me that it’s possible to live differently,” she now says of her parents. And they taught her to think big. After running a real estate agency in Paris for a few years, Fontenoy decided to become the first woman to row the Atlantic from west to east. She completed that journey in 2003, at the age of 25; then she set out to row the Pacific, too.

In an age when bored billionaires use hi-tech gadgetry to get their names in the record books, Fontenoy’s feats hark back to a simpler time of personal strength, resilience and stamina—lots of it. In Pilot, her 7.5-m-by-1.6-m boat, the Atlantic trip lasted four months and covered more than 6,700 km. Thanks to high winds that kept driving her off course, the voyage took a punishing six weeks longer than scheduled—and an extra 2,000 km.

Fontenoy finished her Pacific expedition earlier this year, rowing 7,009 km over 73 days. Here she dealt with a broken seawater-filtration system, had flying fish land on her pillow while she tried to sleep, and dived into shark-infested waters to clean the bottom of her boat. “In the Atlantic, I lost my illusions about what is needed to undertake such a challenge,” she says. “In the Pacific, I learned how to be amazed by the multitudes of things that come from getting back to simplicity.”

Fontenoy recorded her Atlantic experiences in a memoir, Across the Savage Sea: The First Woman to Row Across the North Atlantic. She vividly recounts not just the psychological toll of the storms, the icebergs and the rough seas, but also her encounters with whales and cargo ships, and how, with only a few days to go until the coast of Spain, her water system broke down and she was forced to drink untreated seawater and even her own urine. At one point on the Pacific journey, a wave capsized Fontenoy’s boat, though luckily the vessel righted itself after a couple of minutes.

None of that has put her off seafaring, however, and she’s already planning her next voyage: a solo sailing endeavor. “I took on these challenges to prove that it’s not just about having big arms, but first and foremost about having the will,” she says. “People often say such adventures aren’t for women. I wanted to show that it was more about mentality and determination.” For both men and women, Fontenoy has done just that. —By Julien Pfyffer

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