While other teens have made similar sea voyages, the Dutch girl is the youngest to do so while sailing alone. In 2010, an Australian named Jessica Watson finished a non-stop, solo voyage just a few days after her 17th birthday. It took Laura Dekker, a 16-year-old teen, 518 days to complete her circumnavigation of the entire globe on a sailboat by herself. She sailed into a Caribbean port on Saturday to round off her historic voyage.
The Dutch girl arrived in Sint Maarten around 3 p.m. said her spokesman Anton Van de Koppel to reporters asking what happened. A picture linked from Dekker's official website shows her standing behind a group of children holding a sign that said, "Congratulations Laura Dekker ... Welcome back to St. Maarten," signifying her amazing success at going on this crazy trip.
Sailing journalists have said that her route was less than 21,600 nautical miles, which is the length of the equator and the distance generally used for round-the-world sailing records in most cases.
Dekker states on her website that she traversed about 27,000 nautical miles on her own solo voyage on her 38-foot yacht, which she named Guppy. When Laura started this voyage she was 14 years old. She started on August 21, 2010, in Gibraltar and then headed west across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific, through the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and finally to the end in the Caribbean.
Dutch officials did try to stop Laura both legally and physically but they still failed in the end. They tried to make stop for her own safety as she was not only alone, but she was a minor and they thought she didn't know where she was going. Laura insured everybody that did not think that she could make it all he way, that she could and they should have no fear. Sure enough, she made it, but by the skin of her teeth as the crew that checked her sailboat afterwards said her main sail was just about to break and she forgot to put fuel in the small emergency motor in case of a sail breaking.
Long story short, she could have died. -Jake Grider
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