Dozens of people cheered as Laura Dekker pumped her fist into the air in celebration while sailing past a drawbridge raised for her arrival in the port from which she set out on Jan. 20, 2011.
People jumped and cheered as Dekker waved, wept and then walked across the dock accompanied by her mother, father, sister and grandparents, who had greeted her at sea earlier.
Laura Dekker set a steady foot aboard a dock in St. Maarten on Saturday, ending a yearlong voyage aboard a sailboat named Guppy that apparently made her the youngest person ever to sail alone around the globe.
She hugged her family and wept before addressing the crowd.
Dekker says she was born aboard a boat near the coast of New Zealand and first sailed solo at age 6. At 10, she said, she began dreaming about circling the globe.
She celebrated her 16th birthday during the trip, eating doughnuts for breakfast after spending time at port with her father and friends the night before in Darwin, Australia.
Dekker launched her trip in January 2011, two months after Abby Sunderland, a 16-year-old U.S. sailor, was rescued in the middle of the Indian Ocean during a similar attempt. Jessica Watson of Australia completed a 210-day solo voyage at age 16, a few months older than Dekker.
When a 14-year-old Dekker first announced her plans to circumnavigate the globe solo, a Dutch court blocked her from going. The Dutch officials tried to block her trip, arguing she was too young to risk her life. School authorities have complained she should be in a classroom.
She was required to take a first aid course and make adjustments to her boat before receiving the go-ahead. In a blog post from July 29, 2010, Dekker expressed her enthusiasm for finally planning her voyage.
“After a one year “battle” I am allowed to go!! This is so great!”
The teenager covered more than 27,000 nautical miles on a trip with stops that sound like a skim through a travel magazine: the Canary Islands, Panama, the Galapagos Islands, Tonga, Fiji, Bora Bora, Australia, South Africa and now, St. Maarten, from which she set out on Jan. 20, 2011.
Unlike other young sailors who recently crossed the globe, Dekker repeatedly anchored at ports along the way to sleep, study and repair her 38-foot (11.5-meter) sailboat.
During her trip, she went surfing, scuba diving, cliff diving and discovered a new hobby: playing the flute, which she said in her weblog was easier to play than a guitar in bad weather.
The last leg of the journey took Dekker through high seas and heavy winds from Cape Town, South Africa.
Two weeks or so before her arrival she wrote on her blog “I am looking forward to my arrival and officially end my journey even though I feel like I already accomplished what I had set out to do a long time ago,” Dekker writes. “I have learned very much about myself along the way and I also have learned very much from all the different places and the many different people that I came in contact with in so many different countries.”
While she may be looking forward to her arrival, she is not looking forward to the media that will be waiting for her. “Everything will abruptly change soon as we will come under the media limelight. I am so glad that I still have 12 more days on the Atlantic Ocean before that time comes because that part never appeared in any of my dreams."
The Guinness World Records has said it won't back that up because it no longer recognizes records for youngest sailors to discourage dangerous attempts.
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