First Light: Sailing Alone Around the World and Home to Myself

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A thrilling memoir from the first American woman to race a sailboat solo, nonstop around the world.

“A must-read for every young woman with a dream.”—BILLIE JEAN KING

“Brauer’s strength and resilience inspire us to challenge ourselves to venture out of our safe harbor and experience the high seas of life.”—CHRISTIE BRINKLEY

In 2024, Cole Brauer became the first American woman to race solo around the world, in a forty-foot sailboat named First Light. For 130 days, she navigated mechanical breakdowns, debilitating food poisoning, and the Southern Ocean’s extreme cold. Yet, amid the isolation, she found breathtaking sunrises, impromptu dance parties, and a life-changing sense of peace.

First Light recounts the intimate details of this historic circumnavigation, but it isn’t the typical story of conquering the elements. Instead, it is a memoir of a woman who moved into the most remote environment on Earth and made herself a home. For years, Brauer navigated the rigid hierarchies of a traditionalist sport, facing a relentless tide of skepticism from a world that often tried to ground her before she even left the dock. Out at sea, she didn’t just race 27,000 miles; she proved her critics wrong, reframing one of the world’s most grueling solo races as an act of joyful resistance.

First Light is a reckoning with what it means to belong—in a male-dominated field, in a high-speed world, and within yourself. Unfiltered, exhilarating, and deeply personal, it is a testament to the resilience required to stay true to yourself when the world wants you to stay small. Brauer invites us all to find presence in a noisy world, believe in the impossible, and see the horizon not as a boundary but as a hearth.

Cole Brauer is a record-breaking American professional sailor who finished second in the grueling 2023–2024 solo race around the world. Brauer and her work have been featured in The New York Times and on Today and CNN. A University of Hawai‘i graduate, she is a sought-after speaker for companies and organizations ranging from PJT to Kaiser Permanente, known for her candid storytelling and a philosophy of unvarnished grit. When she isn’t sharing her story on land, she is back on the water as a co-skipper for an IMOCA 60 team.