In a world where grit often gets overlooked and quiet resolve forgotten, the story of Dame Naomi James rises from the deep like a swell on the open ocean—unexpected, powerful, and profoundly stirring. Born on a landlocked sheep farm in New Zealand’s Hawke’s Bay in 1949, Naomi didn’t learn to swim until the age of 23. Yet just six years later, she became the first woman to sail solo around the world via Cape Horn—a notoriously treacherous route reserved for the boldest of seafarers. Today, on Mother’s Day in Aotearoa, it feels fitting to celebrate not just her incredible achievements at sea, but her equally profound journey into motherhood.
Naomi’s story is not that of a trained athlete groomed for greatness. Her origins are earthy and ordinary—working as a hairdresser, not charting weather systems. But her transformation from sheep-farm girl to solo circumnavigator captures something many mothers will recognise: the quiet audacity to dream of something bigger, even when logic says you shouldn’t.
It was love that first pulled her into the orbit of sailing. A stroll along the docks in St Malo, France in 1975 led to a chance meeting with Rob James, a professional skipper. She wasn’t looking for boats—she was smitten by the man. But that love became the anchor and the wind in her sails. When Rob went off to race across the Atlantic, Naomi dreamt up a wild ambition: to sail solo around the world. She had just six weeks’ sailing experience when she floated the idea to her new husband on their honeymoon. Remarkably, instead of laughing it off, Rob backed her—fiercely.
In 1977, aboard the Spirit of Cutty Sark—renamed Express Crusader with Daily Express sponsorship—Naomi set off from Dartmouth, England. What followed was not a tale of breezy adventure, but a relentless test of endurance. She faced 8000 miles of radio silence in the Atlantic. A broken mast and a capsize in the Southern Ocean. At one point, she was miscalculating her own latitude, unsure where she was in a sea that offered no comfort. But she endured. She survived. And 272 days later, she returned to the very port she had left behind—changed forever, though unmistakably herself.
She was 29 years old. For her feat, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and named New Zealand Sailor of the Year in 1978. But perhaps more telling than the honours is how she described the experience in the final paragraph of her 1979 autobiography At One With the Sea:
“In attempting this voyage I risked losing a life that had at last become fulfilling; but in carrying it out I experienced a second life, a life so separate and complete it appeared to have little relation to the old one that went before.”
Yet Naomi’s greatest test was still to come. In 1983, just a year after winning the Round Britain race alongside Rob, tragedy struck. Rob was lost at sea off Salcombe, Devon—ten days before Naomi gave birth to their daughter. In the wake of grief and new motherhood, Naomi stepped away from the limelight. She never chased celebrity, and she didn’t return to the sailing world, plagued as she had always been by seasickness and perhaps realising that one epic journey had been enough.
Instead, she quietly built a new life. She raised her daughter alone, stayed in the home in Ireland that she and Rob had bought together, and turned to philosophy. She completed a master’s degree and later a PhD, retreating from fame but never from her identity as someone who had faced the fury of the Southern Ocean—and won.
In the media frenzy surrounding sailors like Ellen MacArthur, Dame Naomi’s name has often faded from public memory. But that doesn’t lessen her legacy. On this Mother’s Day, her story reminds us that motherhood and adventuring aren’t mutually exclusive. They both ask for courage. They both demand selflessness and tenacity. And they both transform you—permanently.
Dame Naomi James is not just a pioneering sailor or a forgotten heroine. She is a woman who made her own map in life, who risked everything to pursue a dream, and then found her strength again when life capsized her in an entirely different way.
So today, we remember and celebrate her. Not just for sailing alone around the world, but for navigating the even deeper waters of love, loss, and motherhood—with grace, intellect, and quiet determination.
