Jeanne Socrates has a to-do list with serious purpose. Nereida, her 2009 Swedish-built Najad 380, is almost at the point of needing a refit. Her most recent ocean passage, from Mexico to the South Pacific, left the boat with deck hardware problems. It may be necessary to re-rig again. The upcoming work will be extensive.
“She’s seen a lot of action,” Socrates says. “She’s been around the world three and a half times, around Cape Horn three times. She’s done pretty well. I need to make sure everything is OK so I can keep cruising.”
And time, as they say, is everything. Nereida, as of early March, was based at New Zealand’s North Island. The weather window to cruise from there to Tonga will reopen in May, after the cyclone season ends. That will be three months before Socrates celebrates her 82nd birthday in August, likely at that point in Fiji, or having moved on from there to New Caledonia.
She plans to squeeze it all in before cyclone season starts again and forces her back out of the islands, when she’ll sail down to Australia. She got stuck there without a boat for 25 months amid the pandemic’s travel restrictions. It was excruciating, being trapped on an island nation without Nereida, and only occasionally being invited out to sail on other people’s rides. “It would be nice to get the boat there, to actually cruise my boat in Australia,” she says. “I’m looking forward to going there with my own boat.”
More than a decade has passed since Socrates, at age 70, became the oldest woman to single-handedly sail unassisted nonstop around the world. She still holds that title today, and she’s the first woman to sail solo unassisted nonstop around the world from North America. Her most recent nonstop single-handed unassisted circumnavigation ended in 2019, and she set off again in May 2023, departing from Mexico and sailing single-handed once more across the Pacific.
What’s changed with this adventure, she says, is that she’s back in the same cruising mode she enjoyed with her husband in the Caribbean, before he died of cancer in 2003. She’s moving from waypoint to waypoint at a much slower pace than in previous years, and she’s taking time to explore the destinations instead of pushing past them as fast as she can. “When you’re doing a nonstop, which my last two circumnavigations have been, you’re never setting foot on land anywhere. You don’t get to see anywhere,” she says. “I had stopped in a lot of places, but not for very long. I went around in just over a year, so I only stopped in places a short time, and didn’t visit New Zealand at all.”
Socrates has now largely rectified that last bit, after exploring New Zealand’s South Island on foot while Nereida was awaiting repairs on the North Island. It’s not that she’d never laid eyes on the South Island—she’s sailed around the bottom three times—but this most recent visit, she says, was “my only chance ever to have stopped for a long time and really get to know the country. It’s beautiful.”
Sailing single-handed is something she still loves. Getting older doesn’t make it easier, and lifting heavy items can be more of a challenge than it used to be, but Socrates is still winching up Nereida’s sails mostly by hand. She sometimes does the work slower than she used to do it, leaving herself extra time for an easier pace, but she’s not averse to helpful technology—in some cases. “I deliberately never put electric winches in place,” she says. “That’s something that can go wrong and need service. But I do have a cranker now, an 18-volt drill with rechargeable batteries. Most of the time, I do the hand-winching still. I’m mostly manually winching, but I may use my cranker every now and then. It really is lovely to get that last bit of the main up. The torque is such on the drill that you don’t risk damaging the mainsail.”
Another change she’s learning to deal with is ageism on the docks. It’s worse, she says, than the sexism she encountered in her earlier years. Especially with today’s younger sailors, she has learned to introduce herself by saying she’s been around the world single-handed. Only then, she says, do they look at her as more of a peer. “I was just talking to someone from the Philippines, and she wanted to put some kind of a prefix to my name. She said, ‘In the Philippines, we would add a prefix, something that meant older person as a sign of respect.’ They respect older people there. We don’t have that in the West. We used to, when we believed older people had acquired knowledge and wisdom, but now, the youngsters have no respect for that.”
Another challenge she’s encountering these days is cruisers who are less community-minded than the boaters she has known everywhere she sailed throughout the years. She attributes the shifting attitudes to two things: more boats having Starlink, which enables all-day satellite communications that boaters never had in the past; and GPS, which she believes has weakened some newer cruisers’ seamanship skills.
“I’m noticing a different breed of people coming into cruising,” she says. “Normally, you go around the anchorages, and it’s nice people and you chat and meet up. A lot of people aren’t in that mode now. The new cruising community, they’re just not into the social life, the getting together. They’ve got their Starlink, so they talk on that and they stream things.”
GPS has had an impact on the cruising mentality too, she says. “They have GPS and Starlink, and they just go. They think that’s all there is to it. But they don’t always know the rules of the road, the Colregs. I’ve been quite shocked, really, at the attitudes of these so-called cruisers. They’re not the cruisers I used to know so many years ago, and they’re not as friendly. They need to become mariners and know what they’re doing.”
Even still, she says, her favorite thing about being a cruiser is that once you drop the hook in an anchorage, nobody cares much about what you’re wearing, or, most of the time, what kind of boat you’re sailing. A lot of boaters still end up at the beach at the end of the day in T-shirts and flip-flops. Those cruisers still find commonalities in ways that simply aren’t part of life on land.
Ironically, perhaps, even though Socrates is one of the world’s best-known single-handed sailors, the sense of community she experiences all around the world is one of the things she treasures most about the cruising lifestyle. “You’ve got common experiences to talk about. Maybe you’re going to the same place, or you’ve had the same problems on your boat. You’ve always got something to talk about,” she says. “If you give friendliness, you get back friendliness. It’s a basic thing that you learn quite quickly as a cruiser. You really have to give what you want to get in return.”
This article was originally published in the June 2024 issue.
