Inspired Insanity: A Grandmother's Second Solo Circumnavigation

BRISTOL, R.I. — The first time Donna Lange sailed around the world by herself it was hardly an easy journey.

Over 290 days at sea in her 28-foot sailboat, Inspired Insanity, she battled through 60-foot waves and 55-knot winds. She hit tropical storms in the Atlantic and was met by unremitting gales off the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. During one storm off Bermuda that lasted four days, her boat was submerged and the automatic steering system conked out. Lange had to steer manually for 36 hours straight.

In all, the trip took 17 months from 2005 to 2007, with stops along the way for repairs and recovery in New Zealand and Chile. It was incredibly exhausting, but, says Lange, the trip was even more fulfilling.

“I was so content amid the ocean,” she says.

Now, the 53-year-old mother of four and grandmother of 11, who divides her time between Bristol and Florida, is getting ready to do it all again. As she prepares for her second solo circumnavigation of the globe, Lange says she’s excited. But she appears pretty calm.

“I’ve learned a lot. I didn’t know how to do all of these things before. I still don’t know how to do some of them,” she says casually.

It’s a Sunday afternoon and she’s standing beside Inspired Insanity, which is up on blocks and without a mast in a boatyard at the northern end of Bristol Harbor. Lange, her partner, Bob Philburn, and her brother Jeffrey Lange are busy repainting the deck and brushing on a non-slip coating. They’re covered in dust after hours of sanding.

The boat, built in 1982, is into its fourth decade and needs some TLC, says Lange. Looking at it out of the water and up close, it’s hard to imagine it carried her 31,000 miles across three oceans just a few years ago.

Lange’s achievement was an unlikely one. She came to sailing late in life, leaving her home in upstate New York and job as a nurse after she was involved in a fatal car accident in 1998 and had struggled to move on. She answered an ad for a chef on a tall ship in Baltimore, Md., learned to sail and soon bought Inspired Insanity, a Southern Cross, with all the money she had.

In 2002, she sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, from the U.S. Virgin Islands to Ireland, and back. That trip convinced her she had the ability to attempt a voyage around the world.

She fell in love with Bristol on a stop during one of her travels, so she decided to start her circumnavigation from there on a November day in 2005. After she finally returned in May 2007, she was celebrated at the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol and marched with her boat in Bristol’s Fourth of July parade. A few months later, she met Philburn, a yacht manager, at a party in Tiverton.

Providence Journal