Sailor Isabelle Autissier: ‘The ocean is the axis around which my life has turned’

More than half a century ago on a winter’s day in the English Channel, a 10-year-old French girl stood half-frozen on the deck of a sailing boat, mesmerised by the sight of snow falling into the sea and dissolving in the waves off the coast of Jersey. She had vowed that one day she would sail around the world alone and was braving the cold and the snow to prepare for the icy Southern Ocean.

That girl was Isabelle Autissier and she has more than fulfilled her wish, she tells me shortly after we have collided at the entrance to Les 4 Sergents, the restaurant she has chosen for our lunch, near her home in the Atlantic port of La Rochelle. Her shock of curly hair and wry smile are instantly recognisable to those who follow sailing.