Australian girl sails around the world alone

Family and friends will be waiting to meet Jessica Watson when she returns to Sydney this month after sailing around the world alone. Jessica, 16, from Buderim in Australia, started her journey on a ten-metre boat called Ella’s Pink Lady in Sydney last October. Since then she has travelled almost 20,000 nautical miles around the world.

Last week Jessica wrote on her blog that she had passed Australia’s southern island of Tasmania. “We passed well clear of land, in the dark and with not the nicest conditions. But I still got a big kick out of it,” she wrote. Jessica expects to return to Sydney by 15 May.

While Jessica's achievement is fantastic, the World Speed Sailing Record Council (WSSRC) says it won't be a world record, because Jessica will be about 2,000 nautical miles short of the miminum distance. The problem is that she did not sail far enough north of the equator.

Jessica, however, is not worried. She says her goal was to sail around the world – not break a world record. She wrote in her blog, "If I haven't been sailing around the world, then it beats me what I've been doing out here all this time."

Watch Jessica cross the Equator for the first time last year: