Sometimes I sail naked – Sailor grabs headlines

by Sail-World on 21 Nov 2008 33 year old British Sailor Samantha Davies has started a new trend and its working for sponsors and for the sailing audience too, because Sex Sells.

A few days before the start of the Vendee Globe Davies featured in a Daily Mail feature article under the headline ‘Sometimes I sail naked.'

The article was full of images of the trim 33 year old in a modest bikini and now mid ocean Samantha aboard her boat Roxy has repeated the dose with pictures of herself posing bikini clad.

We quote from Britiain’s Daily Mail ‘Sam is a woman of surprises. Sometimes at sea she’s in oilskins; other times she wears nothing at all. (‘In the tropics, when it’s really hot, it’s better to do everything naked.’) If she needs luck, she races in her special knickers: ‘My girl boxers with 'Lucky' in pink diamanté.’

While smiling cynically we, along with our readers will look forward to Samantha sailing in warmer weather and more reports from Roxy.

(And we know it works since we posted this story, its rapidly jumped to the top of the leaderboard of stories opened today on Sail-World. Ed)

Here is the Sam Davies latest report from Vendee race course.

Hello everyone!

At last the sun is really shining so I have got my Roxy bikini out!! The trouble is I'm a bit white so I'm piling on the sun cream to protect my skin, and trying to stay in the shade.

Last night I slept a LOT! In fact, I forgot to set the sound part of my alarm clock, so instead of a one hour sleep, I woke up five hours later, feeling a bit lost and confused, but extremely refreshed!

The reason I slept so well was also that Roxy was slipping along so nicely under spinnaker that her gentle purring helped me sleep. If ever she slows down or something changes, I wake up by the change of noise or motion.

This time, the wake up was due to the wind lifting us; Roxy was saying she was no longer happy and perhaps this was a good opportunity to get further west. I agreed, so we gybed across, passing in front of the little red and green navigation lights of Pindar.

Now, back on Port gybe and heading directly into the Doldrums, we are still slipping along nicely under the beautiful Roxy spinnaker.

Sam x

At 14:00 UK time Thursday, Sam Davies aboard Roxy was in 13th position, 205 miles from race leader Loick Peyron aboard Gitana Eighty