Ann Davison

Who knows what drives people when they decide to shelve their entire lives to sail across the seas. Surely, for some, fortune, fame or both are involved. To etch one’s name in history, perhaps. Maybe curiosity, to see what’s out there over the horizon. For Ann Davison, who in 1953 became the first woman to sail solo across the Atlantic, it was a uniquely and deeply personal story.

Davison and her husband Frank set out in May 1949 aboard their seventy-foot converted fishing ketch Reliance, bound for Cuba and the wider Caribbean. They left from Fleetwood, Lancashire, England, under something close to duress: The refit had exhausted their money, creditors were closing in, and a writ of repossession was about to be nailed to the mast. Frank was an experienced sailor. Ann was a near-total novice. Storms in the Irish Sea drove them back down the coast and around into the English Channel, and on June 4, 1949, Reliance was wrecked against the rocks