Cole Brauer, 29, a 2012 graduate of East Hampton High School, recently became the first female ever to win the Bermuda One-Two sailing race, which began with a single-handed 668-nautical-mile leg from Newport, R.I., to St. George’s, and ended with a double-handed St. George’s-to-Newport leg. It was the 24th running of the biennial race, which began in 1977.
A three-sport athlete at East Hampton High who’s been a professional for the past five years, Brauer didn’t sail until she went to the University of Hawaii, where she learned the ropes, competing in small boats, 24-footers in the Ke’ehi Lagoon on O’ahu and in bigger ones, 40-to-70-footers, with as many as 10 in the crew, between the islands.
“It was mainly windward-leeward in Ke’ehi, but we used the trade winds in the offshore races,” said Brauer, who returned a call early last week from the house of her parents, Kimberly and David, in Boothbay Harbor, Me. Her double win was her “best result thus far, for sure,” she said.
First Light, the Class 40 Owen Clarke-designed boat she raced single-handedly to Bermuda, and in the company of Cat Chimney, a 36-year-old marine electrician who lives in Newport, on the way back, is owned, “by the Day family of Chicago. They’re my sponsors,” she said.
She and the 24 other sailors in the fleet set off from Newport on June 2. Her initial race plan was to follow the rhumb line, “to go direct. My boat was one of the faster ones, so you have to think more about the wind than the current, as the smaller ones do.”
In pre-race planning, she said, there had been some discussion of possibly maneuvering off course to the west to take full advantage of the northeast-southwest front. Brauer said she continued to jibe to stay in the front, though she woke up in the middle of the second night to no wind in her sails, having run right out of the breeze. She then jibed to point even farther away from Bermuda, re-establishing herself into 30 knots of wind. It was a risk she was willing to take in order to keep the boat moving. At 2 in the morning, with 300 nautical miles still to go, she said, and with First Light pointing at Delaware, she jibed back toward Bermuda.
It was reminiscent of a line from “Hamlet”: From indirection find direction out. “Yes, that describes what I did,” she said. “It was a gamble going with the front, but it paid off. My friends were all text-messaging me, wondering what I was doing,” she said with a laugh.
While that gambit added about 90 nautical miles to the distance she sailed, its effectiveness was borne out by the fact that she preceded her nearest competitor to the St. George’s Dinghy & Sports Club in Bermuda by 18 hours. Spanning Newport and St. George’s took her three days, four hours, and 55 minutes.
First Light carries eight sails, most of which Brauer said she used at one time or another. In all, she reckoned she’d made what felt like 100 sail changes on the way down. She didn’t get much sleep. There were storms to be contended with on both legs. And yet, she was more exhausted, she said, on the double-handed return. “When there are two of you, you’re always pushing the boat harder. . . . We had 50 knots of breeze at one point on the double-handed leg after another front had passed by us.”
Brauer, the primary skipper, and Chimney, the secondary one, made it from St. George’s to Newport in three days, one hour, and 30 minutes — 12 hours ahead of the runner-up.
Feted at the St. George’s Dinghy & Sports Club and at the Newport Yacht Club, Brauer received awards for being the first woman skipper ever to win the Bermuda One-Two, first in line honors for both legs, second in PHRF (handicap rating) for both legs, first in Class 1 for both legs, as first woman to win on corrected time for both legs, as well the sportsmanship trophy and award for top navigator.
Next for her will be the Global Solo Challenge, an around-the-world, nonstop, single-handed race whose competitors, beginning at the end of August, are to sail counterclockwise around the world from and to A Coruña, Spain, passing by Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, Australia’s Cape Leeuwin, and South America’s Cape Horn on the way. Brauer said seven women have raced solo around the world, but that she would be the first American woman to do so.