IT was mission accomplished for Nikki Curwen when she crossed the finish line at Pointe-à-Pitre, off Guadeloupe in the Caribbean after over 3000 miles of sailing in her tiny Mini 741 dinghy, Go Ape ! Live Life Adventurously.

Not only had she achieved a life’s ambition by completing the Mini Transat solo yacht race across the Atlantic, she had finished first woman and was a remarkable 12th overall out of the 43 finishers.

She follows in the footsteps of her father, Simon Curwen, who taught her to sail at Frensham Great Pond and who himself sailed the Mini Transat in 2001, finishing second.

When she crossed the line on November 17, she had spent just over 17 days at sea since setting off from Brittany and sailed 3,171 miles at an average speed of 7.75 knots.

This week, she was relaxing in Guadeloupe, having already sold her boat to recoup some of the vast cost of competing in the Mini Transat. “There were some problems on the way and my DIY skills came to the fore,” she said, speaking to the Herald by phone. “The worst bit was breaking my bowsprit which meant I couldn’t use the spinnaker and I was down to half speed. So I had to fix that pretty quickly or it would have been a very boring race.

“My main aim was to finish the race and perhaps come in the top fifteen. To be twelth overall and first woman is just fantastic. Half the boats in my class failed to finish.”

Nikki had to fight off illness before and during the race, but she was delighted to find her mother, Jane, waiting for her at the finish and particularly chuffed to receive many messages of congratulation from her friends back at Frensham Sailing Club.

She had enjoyed 17 days of lone sailing, she said on the website Yachts and yachting.com

“I thought I’d have talked to myself a lot more than I did. It was quite quiet on board, but it was really cool. I don’t know how to describe it, you just have to do it. It’s just amazing. There was never a bad moment, even when I had the spinnaker problem and then when I had no autopilot for 200 miles. Even the bad moments were great.

“I will come back for sure. They say the first one is for practice, so I need to come back. For me, the Mini Transat means three years of hard work completed. I will remember every moment, I have enjoyed it so much. I will remember every sunset.”

Nikki Curwen, 26, sailed Cadet dinghies at Frensham, having been first put in a boat when she was three, and grew up at Rushmoor, near Tilford. At 17, she was sailing 420s and 29ers and raced with her father on the family J105 keelboat.

She raced at Cowes Week and was later selected for the Artemis Offshore Academy, a centre of excellence for rising offshore sailors.

She chose to sail the Mini 6.5, with an eye on the Transat race, and was bitterly disappointed to just miss qualification for the 2013 race.

She made no mistake this year and her performance confirms her as one of Britain’s finest offshore sailors.

The Mini Transat is a solo yacht race across the Atlantic. With only paper charts and a basic GPS for navigation, and no computers, phones or chart plotters allowed, it’s back to basics.

A solo transatlantic yacht race held every two years, it starts in France and, this year, finished at Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe rather than Brazil, the previous destination. The change was to help competitors have plenty of trade-wind sailing and miss out on the doldrums

The race helped launch the career of Dame Ellen MacArthur who went on to break the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe.

The 2015 Mini Transat winner was Frédéric Denis of Brittany who crossed the finish line with his closest rivals trailing by over 50 miles.

His average boat speed over the theoretical distance was 9.04 knots. Nautipark covered an actual total of 3,230.79 miles, more than 455 miles more than the theoretical distance, and sailed at an average of 10.52 knots.