I’m an enthusiast sailor and I enjoy reading about the feats of other people’s sailing. On the professional side, I am an analyst: I look at complicated problems, then try to simplify and explain them to my team. Part of this job implies data preparation, analysis and visualization. As I had a little bit of time, I thought that I could try my hand on some sailing data and settled for solo circumnavigation as I knew that some lists existed. I quickly discovered that the available data was not really good, and I started to clean, aggregate, research, google, mail, … This website is the result of this work.

Sources

I used these main sources of data:

Sir Robin Knox-Johnston’s list	Link
Joshua Slocum Society’s list	Link
Seven Ocean’s list (I believe it’s made by Richard Konkolski)	Link
Ocean cruising club’s list	Link
A list of notable trips, not particularly single handed or around the world.	Link
Latitude 38	Link

If you visit these pages, you will see that they are not in a easy to read format. Also, several of these sources seem to be abandoned and the last entry dating back to around 10 years. In fact, the only one that seems up to date is the one maintained by Knox-Johnston, but still, several trips are missing.

I took the data from these sources and cleaned it up to create this list. Then I added information from several other sources that you can find in each row.

Completeness

As stated, I believe that this list is not complete. Many reasons to this:

• Sailing solo around the world, especially with stops, is not an event that makes the headlines of major newspaper. If the sailor is not communicating online actively, it’s hard to find it by chance.
• There is no definitive authority that you could rely on to keep a log. For instance, if you were to list the trips into space, you could go to just a few entities (NASA, ESA, …) and compile a complete list. No such thing exists with sailing solo around the world.
• Non-stop sailor are much more likely to be on this list than non-solo, because they are less. Also it’s often done in search of performance, so it’s communicated.

Contribute

I will welcome any contribution you wish to make:

• You can contact me and point me to an error or a missing sailor in the list
• You can also contact me just to say hello or start a discussion or enquire about some data
• If you particularly enjoyed this site, you can gift me some money, this will go entirely towards site hosting

Metadata

Column Name	Description
TripRank	This is the ranking of the trip, resulting from my sorting described above. Number 1 means the first one to finish it. Keep in mind that many trips are probably missing from the list and that some dates are imprecise, so this ranking is to use with care.
Non-stop	If the trip was made non-stop the content is “yes”. In fact it is rather “unassisted” as some sailor did in fact anchor at some point (to rest or repair). For instance Knox-Johnston in Otago.
Finish date	The date of finishing the trip. If I could find it, it is the day. Sometimes I could find only the month, and many have only the year. Sometimes the day is calculated from an information I found. For instance “the sailor left for his trip on day XX and completed it YYY days later”. Also for the races like the Vendée Globe, the arrival day is harder to find than the number of days spent at sea. So the arrival date is calculated from there and can hence be off by one day.
Days	The number of days it took to complete the trip. This data is of interest mostly for the non-stop sailors. When there was stops, the number of days is sometimes days at sea only and sometimes including days on land. Look at column Remark for details.
First Name	First name of the sailor
Last name	Last name of the sailor
Country	Nationality of the sailor
Boat	Name of the boat of the sailor. In parenthesis is the model.
Feet	Size of the boat in feet.
Race or departure place	If the trip was made during a race, the race is precised. VG = Vvendée Globe Boc = Boc challenge and successors Around Alone and Velux 5 Oceans If the trip was made outside of a race, the port of departure/arrival is indicated.
Remark	My notes
Sources	Links to sources specific to this trip. Most are public, some are paywalled.
StartYear	Year of the beginning of the trip
RaceHours	For races, the number of hours. Used for sorting when many concurrents arrived on the same day.
Remarks from other lists	Remarks and other bits of information directly taken from other lists. (See sources section above).

Licensing