Thursday, November 21 – One SHOW Only – 6:15pm at the Nugget

Rated PG.  97 minutes.  Tickets are $10.  No Nugget passes, please.

“‘Maiden’ documentary is not just a ripping good yarn, but a meaningful one, too.” - The Washington Post

In 1989, no one had ever seen a competitive all-female sailboat crew, nor would they take them seriously, nor believe they could possibly succeed.  Tracy Edwards, a 26-year-old skipper and navigator from Pangbourne, England proved everyone wrong. She rose from yacht stewardess to cook to eventual recipient of the 1990 Yachtsman of the Year Award, the first woman to ever receive the honor.

Coming from a difficult childhood, Edwards was expelled from high school when she was sixteen and backpacked through Europe.  She landed a job at a bar in Greece where one of her customers asked her if she would work on his yacht.  This began her career at sea.  She would then sign on as a cook on the Atlantic Privateer in the 1985 Whitbread Round the World Race, but she didn’t like it.  Her passion was navigating, and for the next three years, she assembled the first all-female team for the Whitbread race.

She purchased a used 58-foot yacht named Prestige.  The boat had performed well in two Whitbread races, but when Edwards bought her she was simply “a wreck with a pedigree.” To refurbish the boat, Tracy had to refinance her house, and with a tremendous amount of work and sweat, she renamed the vessel Maiden.

Edwards and her tight-knit crew left from Southhampton, England in 1989 to embark on the 33,000 nautical mile, nine-month race.  The New Yorker wrote, “from Uruguay to Australia, through the freezing waters of the Antarctic. When the yacht came into Fremantle, Edwards recalled, ‘the collective jaws around the world just dropped.’”

“Using archival and newly shot material, Holmes tells the story of this unruly daughter who left home when she was young, fell in love with sailing and — on deciding that she wanted to navigate the world — found her cause and herself, a discovery that made her a feminist exemplar,” wrote The New York Times.  Maiden will screen one night only at the Nugget on Thursday, November 21.