Kay Cottee | |
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Born | Kay McLaren[1] 25 January 1954[1] Sydney, New South Wales, Australia |
Nationality | Australian |
Citizenship | Australian |
Occupations |
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Spouses | Neville Cottee (m. 1972–1981)Peter Sutton (m. 1989) |
Children | 1 |
Kay Cottee AO (née McLaren, born 25 January 1954) is an Australian sailor, who was the first woman to perform a single-handed, non-stop and unassisted circumnavigation of the world. She performed this feat in 1988 in her 37 feet (11 m) yacht Blackmores First Lady, taking 189 days.
Born Kay McLaren, the youngest of four daughters,[2] in Sydney on 25 January 1954, Cottee grew up in the southern Sydney suburb of Sans Souci.[3] She was born into a yachting family and was taken sailing for the first time when only a few weeks old.[4] For secondary schooling, she attended Moorefield Girls High School in Kogarah, New South Wales.[5]
Over the next nine years Cottee moved to Pittwater where she built a yacht and established a bareboat charter business.[3]
Cottee now lives in Yamba on the far NSW north coast with television producer husband Peter Sutton.[6] She is an international motivational speaker, boat builder,[7] writer, painter and sculptor.[8]
In 2002 Cottee designed and built the first Kay Cottee 56,[14] a fibreglass/foam sandwich construction yacht designed as a bluewater cruiser.[15] With husband Peter Sutton, Cottee set up a boat building business near Yamba on the north coast of NSW in order to produce the yachts,[16] each one which would take an anticipated 8 months to build.[15]
Since her round the world trip, Kay Cottee has received numerous accolades.
In 1991, Cottee joined the advisory board of the Australian National Maritime Museum.[22] She was chair of the museum from 1995 until 2001.[1][12] In 2000, Blackmores First Lady, was acquired by the museum and placed on permanent display.[22]
Cottee is the author of two books. Her first book, First Lady, was published by Macmillan in 1989. Her second book, All at Sea on Land, was published by Pan Macmillan in 1998, about her life in the ten years since the voyage.