Two-time Olympian and round-the-world race winner lines up for 2026 Solo Trans-Tasman aboard Verdier 40 Vixen
When the fleet departs Opua on 30 May for the 2026 Solo Trans-Tasman Yacht Race, Sharon Ferris-Choat will become only the seventh woman to start the race in its 56-year history.
Only six women have started the Solo Trans-Tasman since 1970, and Jennifer Fitzgibbon’s third place in 2010 remains the best result by a woman in the race’s history. Ferris-Choat knows the significance of becoming the seventh — but once the start gun fires, she is racing everyone.
Offshore pedigree
Ferris-Choat grew up in Northland and started sailing in High School, then committed to an Olympic campaign and was on the dock at the Atlanta Olympic Games within two and a half years. She finished fifth in the Europe dinghy at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics before moving into offshore racing at the highest level.
She later competed in the Jules Verne Challenge aboard the maxi catamaran Royal & Sun Alliance, which dismasted in the Southern Ocean while on pace for the record. She returned to the Olympic Games in 2004 as skipper of a three-woman Yngling crew, finishing seventh at Athens. Then in 2005 the ORYX Quest: 62 days non-stop around the world, her crew becoming the first women, alongside Karine Fauconnier to win a round-the-world race outright.
In 2022, Yachting New Zealand described Ferris-Choat as “an extraordinary sailor who is largely unheralded in this country.” The New Zealand sailing scene has since had little choice but to take notice.
More recently, Ferris-Choat won first divison in the Hamilition Island Race Week, finished fourteenth on line honours in the 2024 Rolex Sydney to Hobart aboard an IMOCA, before competing in the 2026 Doyle Sails Two-Handed Yacht Race alongside co-skipper Taylor Edwards.
Ferris-Choat lives near Kerikeri in Northland and balances offshore racing with family life and running the Vixen Racing programme.
The Tasman challenge
At noon on 30 May 2026, 16 solo sailors will depart Opua Cruising Club in the Bay of Islands — the first time in the event’s history the race has started from Opua — and race 1,170 nautical miles across the Tasman Sea to finish at Southport Yacht Club on Queensland’s Gold Coast. The preferred route at this time of year takes competitors north to find the Easterlies before riding a long westward arc toward Queensland. The Southport finish brings its own challenge: a man-made seaway through Surfers Paradise Beach with a sandbar across the mouth of the Coomera River, approached after the best part of a week at sea.
Ferris-Choat races Vixen Racing, a Verdier 40 and the second equal largest boat in the fleet behind a 55-footer. She is targeting six to seven days, with monohull line honours as her primary goal and a handicap podium also in her sights.
This will be her sixth Tasman crossing and her first solo. She has prepared with over a thousand solo miles on Vixen Racing, including a recent training run around Cape Brett in 35 knots and five-to-six metre seas.
Solo sailing demands constant management of fatigue, weather and boat speed. Ferris-Choat will sleep in short intervals throughout the crossing while handling all navigation and sail changes alone. Vixen Racing carries a comprehensive offshore safety and communications setup tailored for solo racing conditions.
“To have a chance of winning, we must first finish,” she says. “Breaking the boat or me, that’s not an option.”
Building pathways
Behind the campaign is the Vixen Racing Academy, Ferris-Choat’s pathway programme for getting people into coastal and offshore sailing who don’t already have a route in. The Academy provides real sea miles with genuine hands-on responsibility — trimming, helming, decision-making under guidence and experence. It is deliberately inclusive, with men and women training and racing together.
After Southport, the programme continues: Sydney to Gold Coast Race, Gold Coast to Mackay Race, Airlie Beach and Hamilition Island Race Weeks, academy passages through the Whitsundays, then south to prepare for a second Sydney to Hobart on Vixen Racing. The Trans-Tasman is one chapter in a longer campaign.
Five of the six women who have previously started the Solo Trans-Tasman have finished it. Sharon Ferris-Choat arrives at the startline as the seventh woman in race history, carrying more than 124,000 offshore racing miles and one of the strongest sailing résumés in the fleet.
Learn more about the Vixen Racing Academy.
