Sailing: Edwards plans assault on record books

Tracy Edwards announced a £5m programme of record attempts yesterday. She has found sufficient funding to buy the 110-foot catamaran Club Med, winner in Grant Dalton's hands of The Race last year, and will rename it Maiden II for her three-year plan to tackle two non-stop dashes round the world and a few other records along the way.

Edwards hopes to lop 10 days off the record of 71 days 14 hours 18 minutes for the Jules Verne Trophy, though the holder, Olivier de Kersauson, is a week into his attempt to lower that in his 110-foot trimaran, Geronimo.

Edwards found fame with an all-woman entry for the 1989-90 Whitbread Round the World Race and she returns to the same formula for a second attack on the Jules Verne Trophy, for the fastest non-stop circumnavigation, early next year. When she tried to lift the record in the 92ft catamaran Enza in 1998, all came crashing to a halt when the yacht was dismasted before rounding Cape Horn.

Edwards feels that prejudice against women "remains very strong. There is still a need to do this. We started it and we need to finish it". Her return could see her in direct confrontation with Britain's best-known yachtswoman, Ellen MacArthur. The singlehander and multihull campaigner is hidden from public view as she tries to complete an autobiography that is already a year late. "It is excellent news for the continuing success of offshore sailing," MacArthur said.

If Edwards had not exercised her option to buy Club Med, MacArthur would have been willing to pay over $2m (£1.4m) for the boat. While Edwards was not ready to say she would be an armchair admiral, she acknowledged that many of the crew are capable skippers: "I think it would be egotistical in the extreme to think I would be the best person to skipper this boat." Nor is she committed to an all-woman crew. Hers was the first confirmed entry for the second running of The Race in 2004: "We will be accepting male CVs."

The boat has been undergoing repairs at the yard where Dalton also built his Volvo Ocean Race boats, at La Ciotat, near Marseilles. From there Edwards hopes to set a Marseilles to Carthage record, move on to Cadiz for the Route of Discovery race across the Atlantic to San Salvador, and then go to Florida for a Miami to New York record attempt.