![\"Gráinne](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/YY5CC6O7ZNCSXCF5DRJIEHMVIM.jpeg\")
Gr\u00e1inne Costigan sailed from France to the Caribbean <\/p>\nAn Irish woman has reached land after sailing across the Atlantic solo as part of a \u201clow-technology\u201d race.<\/p>\n
At around 6pm, Dubliner Gr\u00e1inne Costigan had \u201cjust finished\u201d the Mini Transat 2025 competition which took her from France to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean via the Canary Islands, her mother Gerardine Costigan confirmed.<\/p>\n
While approaching land, Gr\u00e1inne danced a jig from inside her boat.<\/p>\n
Gr\u00e1inne Costigan is the first Irish woman to make the crossing in the Mini Transat 6.5, a six and a half metre boat.<\/p>\n
However, even she is \u201creluctant\u201d to say she is the first Irish woman to sail the Atlantic solo as she is not sure, explained her sister Meadhbh Costigan.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m delighted she is in, it\u2019s something she has always wanted to do,\u201d her mother said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had great faith in her, it\u2019s a great achievement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The competition, first created in 1977, has almost 100 people competing to cross the Atlantic Oceanon small sailboats with limited technical means.<\/p>\n
While competing, Costigan is allowed no contact with the outside world. <\/p>\n
\u201cShe has to do all her own meteorology and navigation herself,\u201d her sister said. \u201cIt\u2019s a low-technology race and they do that to lower the bar for entry. They get one broadcast of weather a day and they have to use that to decide how to navigate. They watch the horizon for cloud build-up so, it\u2019s quite old school.\u201d<\/p>\n
Costigan grew up in a sailing family, on the coast in Sutton, Co Dublin, with her family home overlooking the sea. Her father had a 25-foot yacht called \u201cFreya\u201d that she and her sister went out on as children.<\/p>\n
She began to build the skills required for the race at an early age. From the age of eight, she attended summer sailing school at Sutton Dinghy Club and later Howth Yacht Club. She started studying meteorology and navigation from the age of 10 or 11. <\/p>\n
After spending the last four years training and qualifying for the event, she left the port at Les Sables d\u2019Olonne in France on September 20th.<\/p>\n
In preparation for the competition, she had sailed around the likes of Azores Islands and the Mediterranean solo.<\/p>\n
Gr\u00e1inne Costigan sailed from France to the Caribbean <\/p>\n
\u201cShe has a lot of experience in that boat now and you just have to trust someone that they know what they\u2019re doing,\u201d said her sister.<\/p>\n
A week in, she had to make an emergency stop in Leix\u00f5es, Portugal due to the cancellation of the first leg of the race due to tropical storm Gabrielle, which caused widespread damage in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean.<\/p>\n
She left there on September 29th and landed at La Palma in the Canary Islands on October 10th. <\/p>\n
After a rest period, on October 25th, she set out for Guadeloupe where she finished the race, a crossing of 4,050 nautical miles on her boat called Sea Fever after the James Mansfield poem.<\/p>\n
Gr\u00e1inne has funded herself. The boat alone cost \u20ac50,000 second-hand. <\/p>\n
Her sister explained that sailors go down south to the Cape Verde Islands, where they hit the trade winds which blow the boats across the Atlantic. She has been travelling across the Atlantic Ocean at a speed of five nautical miles an hour. <\/p>\n
Meadhbh likened the boat to \u201ca large dinghy.\u201d There are no facilities on board such as a shower or toilet. She has to take bucket showers and naps whenever she can. <\/p>\n
She has been helping Gr\u00e1inne by posting updates from her GoPro video camera to YouTube and social media, allowing people to follow her journey.<\/p>\n
She described her sister as \u201can amazing woman. There\u2019s no stopping her. She\u2019s kind of fierce.\u201d<\/p>\n
Around the coast of Galicia, sailors became concerned about orcas as a number lost their rudders to attacks.<\/p>\n
Meadhbh, her brother and her mother went to see Gr\u00e1inne at Les Sables d\u2019Olonne and La Palma and her mother met her when she completed the race at Guadeloupe to \u201csupport her as best as we can\u201d.<\/p>\n
Gr\u00e1inne works as a data scientist for the pharmaceutical industry and lives in Barcelona, Spain where will she will return to on December 1st after three months off work.<\/p>\n
Her sister explained that she is \u201cbig into representation. Women in science and sailing, both professions can be male-dominated, but she\u2019s all for seeing women do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
After completing the race, she will spend a week in Guadeloupe to recover and celebrate with her fellow sailors. <\/p>\n
Her next dream is to participate in the Vend\u00e9e Globe, a solo circumnavigation of the globe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Irish woman has reached land after sailing across the Atlantic solo as part of a \u201clow-technology\u201d race.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67,70755],"class_list":{"0":"post-182275","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topstories","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-world-news","22":"tag-worldnews","23":"tag-your-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115554555279360426","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}