GO YOUR OWN WAY

Jeanne Socrates is the oldest woman to sail solo around the world, and her message to The Weekly's readers is to up anchor and follow your dreams.

- WORDS by SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

Jeanne Socrates, a very lively 83-year-old – the oldest person to have circumnavigated the globe, solo, nonstop, via the five great capes – is having trouble choosing her happy place. There are so many, she explains, but she finally settles on two.

The first is this: “It’s daytime in the tropics, the wind’s good, the sun’s shining and maybe a whale comes by, or a pod of dolphins. Dolphins are beautiful – the way they all jump together in twos or threes or fours, or when they’re riding your bow wave and you look down at them and they look up at you.”

If she sees a pod of dolphins in the distance, Jeanne will bang on the side of her yacht, Nereida II, “and they always swim over. They’re so sociable. They keep me company.”

Jeanne’s second happy place is half a world away. “I’m in the Southern Ocean,” she begins and her eyes light up at the memory. “The sun is shining, the seas are ginormous, but the peaks are well separated, so you can just sit there and watch the ocean in awe. Perhaps there’s an albatross gliding by and looking me in the eye, and storm petrels dancing on the sea. Oh, it’s wonderful.”

She is not religious, she says. “Not as such, but I do feel that being in the Southern Ocean is a very spiritual experience. You’ve got these amazing seas, amazing cloudscapes, and then there are the birds. You’re thousands of miles from anyone and anything. It’s just you in your little bubble – your boat. You’re totally self-contained, but you are in this enormity. You get an immense respect for nature when you’re out there. You have to be at one with it.”

Jeanne did not begin sailing until she was 50, but she has always been courageous. Her mother was a Londoner. Her father, an Australian, had joined the RAAF, been posted to Yorkshire and was killed in a training exercise just five weeks after Jeanne was born.

“We were living in London in the Blitz,” she tells