East Hampton's Cole Brauer, back from sailing the world, talks van life and new book

Two years after carving her name into sailing history, Long Island native Cole Brauer is most at home in motion — whether blasting through the ocean or traveling in the van she lives out of: the “Silver Vixen.”

Brauer, a 31-year-old East Hampton High School alumna and ocean racer, has kept busy since making history as the first American woman to circumnavigate the globe solo in a sailboat. She's been working at marinas and making professional speeches and has written a memoir.

Brauer completed a 130-day, 27,000‑mile solo circumnavigation of the globe as part of the Global Solo Challenge. She placed second in a race against more than a dozen male sailors. She left from the northwest tip of Spain on Oct. 29, 2023, and completed the treacherous trip on March 7, 2024.

“It was an amazing opportunity to be able to go around the planet,” she said in an interview during a recent trip back to East Hampton.

By the time she crossed the start line, Brauer had logged enough miles to have circled the globe twice. She rebuilt her boat around her own needs, knew every tool on the vessel, and completed extensive medical and safety training.

Brauer documented the journey on Instagram, where she has amassed close to a half million followers.

Randi Cherill, who was an athletic trainer at East Hampton High School when Brauer was a student, followed the trip on social media. She said she is fortunate to have played a role in Brauer’s journey as an athlete.

“What she was able to accomplish, and what she was able to do, is astounding,” Cherill said. “That’s what we like to see with our athletes and our former athletes, and who they grow up to be.”

Brauer was inducted into the East Hampton High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2024. She ran track, played soccer and cheered for the school. She did not come from a sailing family, and discovered the sport at 19 when she joined the sailing team at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Brauer said she hopes her story “gives some kids some inspiration to get into a sport that maybe they don’t know anything about, like sailing.”

Her memoir, “First Light,” chronicles her upbringing, the beginning of her sailing career and her historic trip. The book is scheduled to be released in September.

Brauer, who is 5-feet-2-inches and weighs 100 pounds, hardly fit the stereotype of an ocean racer, she said. “It’s a super male-dominated sport,” she said.

“You have to be competing at the exact same level — if not higher — if you want to be able to compete against [men], and I find that challenge amazing and wonderful,” she said.

The book discusses the “trials and tribulations of what it was like being a woman in a very male, older, white [sailing] community and everything that comes with that,” she said.

Brauer also wanted to bring light to the gender pay gap in sports and other fields.

“If I can go out and do something totally insane, like sailing around the globe for 130 days and get second place as the only female, then women should be getting paid equal, and it doesn’t just mean in the sailing community — it means in all communities that are dominated by men,” she said.

NewsdayTV's Jamie Stuart contributed to this story.