As this season’s cohort of Southern Ocean sailors leave or are on a countdown to depart, one lone woman has entered. American sailor Donna Lange, a 42-year-old former nurse and mother of three, rounded the Cape of Good Hope on 16 February and is heading towards New Zealand. Donna is sailing a diminutive 28ft double-ender named Inspired Insanity and was about 450 miles NNW of the Kerguelen Islands on 4 March.

She left Bristol, Rhode Island in November and has not stopped, and her plan is to continue to New Zealand for the summer and a refit, and continue round Cape Horn to the east coast of the US next season.

It would be fair to say that Donna?s voyage is a journey of personal and spiritual enlightenment. After surviving a hideous car accident in which a number of people died, she decided to learn to sail and later to sail alone round the world.

By coincidence, within the next week she should pass north the only other female solo circumnavigator out there. Until yesterday, neither she nor Dee Caffari knew about each other.