That night she lay in her bunk and stared at the dented ceiling as the boat rolled sickeningly. She went over and over what she could have done differently. She’d put everything into this boat, this voyage. It had become her identity. Soon it would be gone.
On the evening of December 6, Howells and her husband, Goodall’s stepfather, sat down to watch the news. They knew that a cargo ship was coming for Goodall, and in her gut Howells never doubted that Goodall would return alive. But now they, too, were navigating a storm: a salivating media eager to get a peek at a family’s emotional crisis.
Outside the gated fence, a journalist and a photographer had been parked all day. Messages from other reporters piled up on her phone. “How does it feel that your daughter is stuck in the middle of the most ferocious ocean on earth?” one asked. Another inquired, “What’s the first thing you’ll say to her when you see her?” Howells didn’t reply. “It felt,” she later said, “like the sensationalism of somebody’s misfortune just to get more views and followers, without any thought to what it may do to those of us who care about her.”
Now, as Howells and her husband were watching BBC News, a segment about Goodall came on, and it included audio from her first call to McIntyre. Howells hit the roof.
Earlier that day, race organizers sent that recording to the family, who had asked that it not be released to the media. They thought it was in poor taste to do so while Goodall was still in danger. (McIntyre noted that Goodall had signed an agreement granting the race organizers permission to release audio from satellite phone calls. McGuckin’s call after his dismasting wasn’t released until after he was safe, because, reported The Times, “he feared it would distress his mother and girlfriend if they knew the danger he was facing.”)
Headlines immediately appeared around the globe. When outlets had covered Tomy’s and McGuckin’s rescues a month and a half before, the coverage tended to focus on their bravery. “Irish Sailor Makes Heroic Efforts to Reach & Help Injured Rival Abhilash Tomy!” read a headline in The Better India. Those about Goodall took a different tone, shaped in part by Goodall’s fame as the only woman and in part by the fact that the race had released only the portion of the call in which Goodall sounded shaken and distraught. The media never heard Goodall say that she was prepared to save herself. “British yachtswoman ‘clinging on’ as she waits for rescue,”heralded the Daily Mail. The BBC quoted McIntyre saying, “She was in shock and during a dramatic phone call didn’t want to abandon the boat. But we had to make her realize it was more serious than she thought.” Just like that, it seemed like race organizers were trying to shift the narrative around her journey from lone heroine to feckless damsel in distress.
Just before dawn on December 7, three days after she pitchpoled, Goodall came on deck to see the lights of Tian Fu, a 620-foot-long cargo ship in the distance, a floating city heading her way.
It was the third day of the storm. Though the swells had fallen to 15 feet, getting aboard the Tian Fu wouldn’t be easy. A 42,000-ton ship can’t just pull alongside a far smaller one—a damaged one, no less—and toss down a rope ladder. This was the plan: The Tian Fu had to maintain a steady two knots to have steering capability, so Goodall would motor alongside to keep pace and avoid being crushed between the ship and the waves. Once both vessels were in position, the Tian Fu would deploy a crane to pluck Goodall off her boat.
As first light sparked the horizon and the ship approached, Goodall started her engine, which had worked during a test run the day before. Now, though, it smoked like it might explode, emanated an acrid smell, and went dead. Her stomach dropped. She would have to do without.
She grabbed her bag of belongings and looked around the ruin of her home. Before she left the cabin for the last time, she turned the bilge pumps back on. The boat had done so much for her. Goodall would do everything she could in return, even if it meant DHL Starlightwould stay afloat only a few more hours.
The bow of the massive freighter loomed, a wall of steel blocking the sky. As it passed, crewmen threw down a line; Goodall had a split second to admire the incredible maneuvering by the ship’s captain. She caught the line and attached her bag, which was hauled up first. Goodall winced each time her boat made impact with the ship’s massive hull.
Now it was her turn. The Tian Fu positioned its crane, which was at the ship’s stern, above her. The crew lowered a hook, and she clipped it to her harness. With the boat and the ship both rolling in the waves, she struggled to get it attached properly, nearly falling into the ocean in the process. Then she got it on, and it yanked her into the air.
As the crane swung her skyward, Goodall looked down at the husk of her little sailboat. It didn’t feel right, to be lifted from her boat like this, to be leaving it alone. Once Goodall reached the deck and unclipped herself, the cargo ship chugged forward, leaving DHL Starlight bobbing in the empty Southern Ocean.
Goodall knew she would never forgive herself.
IV.
Goodall spent a week aboard the Tian Fu. She couldn’t communicate much with the crew, so she spent most of her time in her cabin. She was thankful to be left alone. She went up to the bridge and used gestures to request a pen and paper from the captain. Then she wrote. She wrote down everything about the past three days, willing herself to remember it. When she’d emptied the pen, she got another from the captain. She emptied that one too.
Goodall spoke with her family occasionally by sat phone. On one of the calls, they told her that McIntyre had played them the recording of the first call she’d made during the storm—she had no idea he’d recorded her. She imagined what her family must have gone through as they waited for her to be rescued. She’d known she was OK, and she’d told her mother as much, but still, they’d had to listen to that call and worry.
As the cargo ship neared land and the experience she’d weathered settled into her being, the emotions piled on. She’d prepared for every eventuality except failure, a fact that left her feeling pinned, gasping. The sense that she’d put her family through hell only made it worse.
On December 14, the hump of Chile’s Cape Horn appeared on the horizon. Goodall went to the back deck and stood facing away from South America, toward the open sea, trying to relieve some of her dread. She was still processing a near-death experience, and far from ready to be back on land. She hoped it would be just her family there when she stepped ashore. She didn’t want to speak to anyone else. But the media had been a presence, hounding her, for so long. There was no reason to think it would treat her arrival any differently. Her dread intensified.
Then, down below, dozens of dolphins surfaced suddenly from the sea.
OK, she thought. I can do this.
When the ship anchored outside Punta Arenas, Goodall glimpsed the small boat that had been sent to fetch her. It was packed with cameras. Her heart dropped into her stomach. She held on to the dolphins in her mind.
Once she boarded the small boat, she was directed to a certain side of the deck so that cameras on shore had a better view of her. “No comment,” she said again and again. At the dock, someone told her to stay on the boat while journalists set up photo ops. When she was finally allowed to step off the deck, they directed her further: “There’s your mom, go hug your mom.”
Of course Goodall wanted to hug her mother. She’d had no human contact for months. But to have this private moment stage-directed felt cheap. “When she got off the boat,” Howells told me, “she seemed, apart from being bruised from the pitchpoling and the cuts all over her hands, deflated. Totally deflated. It was like hugging a shell. It was all her dreams, aspirations, years of hard work, at the bottom of the ocean. And here’s everyone just wanting a bit of a person grieving.”
Goodall didn’t speak to any journalists that day. Her mother and brother took her to a hospital to have her wounds checked—nothing major, they would heal on their own—and then back to their hotel. Later that day, Goodall gave a statement. She thanked her family, sponsors, and everyone involved in the rescue. On the question of whether she would undertake such a voyage again, she said, “I would say yes in a heartbeat. You may ask why. Some people just live for adventure. It’s human nature. And for me, the sea is where my adventure lies. That fire in my belly is far from out.”
She took no questions.
When the ship anchored outside Punta Arenas, Goodall glimpsed the small boat that had been sent to fetch her. It was packed with cameras.
Back in the UK, Goodall spent Christmas at her mother’s house. The mini bottle of wine she’d packed for the occasion was deep in the Southern Ocean by now. “So many people said to me, ‘Thank God she’s home. You can have a good family Christmas,’ ” Howells said. “I’d reply that I’d rather she weren’t here for Christmas. She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be at sea.”
Goodall was withdrawn and listless. Even after coming home, she used “we” often, unconsciously, to refer to herself—as if she was still aboard her boat and not adrift on land. She found herself wondering what the point of the past four years had been. So many people had offered support and money, and she had disappointed them. Meanwhile, the media didn’t let up. Reporters bothered her family every day. Online, her comment that she would undertake the journey again “in a heartbeat” was seized on. “And capsize again at a cost to life and limb best stay in the kitchen luv,” someone wrote on Twitter. Another asked, “What about the poor people who have to rescue the silly mare again?” For her part, Goodall only said on social media that she needed time to process things before she told her story. Then she went quiet.
Perhaps she’d been naïve when she signed up for the Golden Globe, Goodall thought. She assumed that she could be one of the sailors circumnavigating the world. But it would never be that simple, by dint of her being a woman and the world being what it is. Now she wrestled with the creeping realization that the narrative she despised had gotten to her; one can’t be the object of relentless attention without being shaped by it, one way or another. Goodall sometimes felt awful that she, the lone woman, hadn’t finished. In other moments she wished she’d never thought about going around the world.
In January, Goodall received a set of questions from a PR firm arranging a series of interviews in cooperation with DHL. She didn’t want to do it; she was still trying to process what had happened to her out there. But she also felt that she’d somehow wronged her sponsor by not finishing the race, and by losing the boat they’d paid to refit, and owed it to them to participate. So she steeled herself and agreed. Then she got the questions: What happened when the wave hit? What do you think went wrong? How did you feel about leaving your boat?
She choked on a sob. Everyone wanted the story of how her journey ended, but Goodall had spent 160 days alone with her boat and the ocean. She’d navigated not one monstrous storm but two, and at just 29 years old had held her own amid a fleet of experienced circumnavigators. She couldn’t do this to herself. She couldn’t relive her failure, let alone put it up for exhibit. She couldn’t be the rescued damsel.
Two days before the interviews were set to begin, Goodall backed out. She felt guilty; she knew DHL would be disappointed, maybe even angry. She knew that all the people who’d followed her journey expected to hear her speak. She suspected the race organizers might portray her as uncooperative. But she canceled anyway.
Over the next few months, she turned down thousands of dollars for an exclusive first interview. She rejected book deals and documentary offers. Saying no became her way of protecting herself and her story. She would speak if and when she wanted to.
Three and a half years after returning home from the Southern Ocean, Goodall spoke to me from the flat where she lives now in Edinburgh with her fiancé, a professional ship’s pilot. A bright painting of a boat with sails full of wind hung on one wall; shelves loaded with books lined another. After the Golden Globe, Goodall worked in a boatyard to avoid thinking too much and then returned to sea as an instructor. When we spoke, her hands were full with something else: Her newborn was asleep in her arms.
A cup of tea went cold as she talked. This was the first time she’d told the whole story: the preparation, the voyage, the wave, the aftermath.
She agreed to speak with me on the condition that I wouldn’t try to paint her as a hero or a feminist icon. Those portrayals still bother her, as does the black cloud the media pressure cast over her. It’s only recently that she’s been able to grasp the value of the journey she undertook.
Goodall wasn’t able to remember much about the wave and the hours after it hit, not until she reread what she’d written on the Tian Fu. The rest of the race, though, she remembered like yesterday. As she recounted falling in love with Ariadne, Goodall was animated, lighting up like the sun burning through marine fog.
These days she still wants to circumnavigate the globe, but she has no desire to make the voyage alone, without stopping. She wants to show the world to her son, to sail with her fiancé on their own time and whim. Sometimes though, she told me, she dreams that she made it to the finish. Or that she sailed DHL Starlight to Chile. That she never left her alone out there.
It was her brother, months after she got home, who urged her to check her social media account; there were some incredible messages on there, he said. She also went through the piles of unopened letters she’d received. Many were from young girls who’d followed the Golden Globe. “A lot of the time,” she said, “it was their dads who would follow it, and because there was a woman in it, they would introduce their young daughters to the race.”
She went to the bookshelf and pulled down a box. A piece of pink construction paper fell out; it featured a crayon drawing of a boat on a blue ripple of water, and a stick-figure woman with yellow hair waving from it. Goodall read the card that arrived with the drawing aloud:
Dear Susie, please find enclosed the picture of you drawn by my two daughters, Lily three, and Penny eighteen months. I wanted you to see this so that in your disappointment about the GGR, you remember what you have achieved. While not tangible like a medal, inspiring young girls to be great is, at least in my mind, a far greater feat.
It wasn’t that Goodall never wanted girls to look up to her. She wanted the fact that a woman tried to circle the world to be an admirable thing, but also a normal one. Now she takes heart in the fact that so many messages sent to her don’t mention how the race ended for her. All that mattered was that she’d set off in the first place, that she’d risen to a great challenge.
Goodall told me that her father recently said it was her destiny to survive. She’d never thought of it that way. But the thing about destiny, he suggested, is that you can’t see it until it’s unfolded.
When I first spoke to Stephen Goodall about his daughter’s experience, he told me a story. There’s an uninhabited rock, barely an island, off the coast of Scotland, he said, with a cave full of hexagonal basalt formations that served some ancient, mysterious purpose. A ritual was performed there in which an individual was set adrift to face a storm in a coracle, a round boat of animal hide and wood the size of a bathtub. When the storm passed, the others waited to learn whether the seeker had survived, and in doing so touched the thin place between earthly life and the spirit realm.
I scoured the internet for details of this ritual; I reached out to scholars and museums. But I came up short of any reference to coracle boats and spirit-testing ocean journeys. I asked Stephen how he’d encountered the story in the first place. He said that someone had told it to him. Perhaps it was just a myth.
We tell and share stories to explain things. Myths are no different. But when we feel the urge to birth new myths for new eras, it can be difficult to deviate from the paths our heroes were sent down before, to move beyond archetypes. We go with what is already known, what is easy.
Before Stephen told me about the cave, I’d been wrestling with the arc of Goodall’s story. What I came to understand is that it isn’t about the trappings of adventure or the silver linings of failure; it certainly isn’t about anything measurable, like Goodall’s impact on sailing or young women. It was about how a journey shaped a person, in ways knowable and not.
Some stories are ours to consume. But some, perhaps, are best left to the seeker and the thin place where they touched grace.