‘Maiden’: The tense story of seawomen who braved the waves and the cynics

Tracy Edwards (center) steers her yacht during the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Race, the subject of the documentary “Maiden.”

“I hate the word feminist,” British sailor Tracy Edwards told the TV cameras before embarking on a round-the-world race with the first-ever all-woman crew in 1989. “I [just] like to be allowed to do what I want to do.”

Four years earlier, she had begged her way onto a South African yacht as the cook.

“I never wanted anything in my life as much as to fit in with those guys,” she recalls in the new documentary “Maiden.” Instead, “I was treated like a servant” at the boys club.

If she couldn’t join them, she decided, she would have to beat them. As she scrambled to raise sponsorship money and restore a secondhand yacht, rechristened Maiden, the press pooh-poohed her efforts. And when her crew surpassed expectations in the opening legs of the Whitbread Round the World Race, condescension grew to outright hostility. One reporter called the boat “a tinful of tarts.”

“What the aggression against Maiden did was made me realize maybe I actually am a feminist,” she says. “I’d begun a fight I didn’t realizing I was having.”

Tracy Edwards on the Maiden in 1989.

Thirty years later, as soccer fans everywhere applaud the women in the World Cup, “Maiden” celebrates the defiant spirit of all the female athletes who have challenged the sporting world’s entrenched sexism.

It’s also a flat-out good yarn. With plenty of archival footage to go with the usual talking-head interviews, director Alex Holmes (“Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story”) takes a straightforward chronological approach, and it works beautifully because the facts fit neatly into the familiar three-act structure of fictional films, with setbacks, triumphs and a climax that isn’t quite what you expect but delivers an emotional payoff.

The dramatic tension is very real.

“The ocean’s always trying to kill you. It doesn’t take a break,” says Edwards, who made a risky shortcut along the coast of Antarctica to beat the other boats in Maiden’s class from Uruguay to New Zealand.

Some of the all-female crew aboard the Maiden.

During the next leg of the race, however, the yacht took on water and the crew lost 18 hours on the way to Fort Lauderdale. Dreading the I-told-you-so’s awaiting them on the docks, she had the women dress in bathing suits as a distraction.

“In hindsight, we really didn’t think that through enough,” Edwards says.

Maybe, but in the end, she won the respect of her critics and the ironic title of Britain’s Yachtsman of the Year.

Meanwhile, Maiden’s voyage continues, marking the race’s 30th anniversary with a victory lap around the globe. The yacht’s latest crew sailed into Honolulu this week.