Watson Tags Equator

Yesterday, sixteen-year-old Aussie solo sailor Jessica Watson crossed the equator — the first milestone in her attempt to set the record for the youngest person to sail around the world alone, non-stop and unassisted. She celebrated by hosting her own initiation by King Neptune, complete with a saltwater dunking and an offering of melted chocolate. Watson is currently 33 days into her voyage and the tracker on her website shows that her S&S 34 Ella’s Pink Lady is roughly 200 miles west of Kiribati, one island of which she intends to round before diving south and around Cape Horn.

"I thought that crossing the line would be just like any other day out here, so I surprised myself a little by getting a bit emotional as I juggled three different cameras while counting down the latitude read-out on the GPS," Watson wrote in her blog. "It’s not so much physically crossing into the northern hemisphere that had me so worked up (you can only get so excited about an invisible line in the water!), but the fact that it meant the end of the first leg. Sure, this has probably been one of the easier legs (call it the shake down!) compared to some of the sailing to come. But the distance we’ve already covered is pretty amazing. Getting this far (and everything that happened before the start line!) has given me the confidence to know that, even though we’ve got some seriously tough times ahead, we’re going to be able to have fun tackling whatever comes our way."