Around the world in 71 days and 14 hours

LONDON - Ellen MacArthur has endured stormy seas, 65-mph winds, a broken sail, burns, bruises and exhaustion -- even a close encounter with a whale. The payoff: a solo around-the-world sailing record.\nThe 28-year-old Englishwoman completed the 26,000-mile circumnavigation at 5:29 p.m. EST Monday by crossing an imaginary finish line between Ushant, France, and the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall on the south coast of England.\nHer final time was 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds, her control team said.\nHer 75-foot trimaran B&Q broke the record set by Francis Joyon, who set the mark of 72 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes and 22 seconds in February 2004.\nMacArthur, who planned to come ashore later in Falmouth later, where a large media group was waiting, told supporters she was physically and mentally exhausted.\n"I can't wait to get in. It's been a very, very long trip and an exceptionally hard one," she wrote on her Web site early Monday. "I'll be glad to be crossing that finish line and finally feeling a little bit of relief."\nWhen she was done, MacArthur was congratulated by Prince Charles and British sailing great Sir Robin Knox-Johnston.\n"We have all watched your progress with the greatest possible excitement over the last 71 days ... the whole of the United Kingdom is, I know, delighted by your success," the prince said in a statement.\n"Ellen has done superbly. It is an outstanding effort," said 65-year-old Knox-Johnston, who made history in 1969 when he became the first person to sail single-handedly around the world nonstop in 312 days.\n"When Francis Joyon beat the record last year, he took three weeks off the old time, and that was mammoth. Then I thought that record would stand for years, and now Ellen has come in and broken it," Knox-Johnston said.\nMacArthur's journey began Nov. 28. Since then, she has slept an average of 30 minutes at a time and four hours in any day. She has reheated freeze-dried meals on a single burner stove while living in an area measuring 5 feet by 6 1/2 feet. Her water supply was desalinated from the sea.\nShe spent Christmas Day in a storm, but after crossing the halfway mark at Cape Horn on New Year's Eve, she built a four-day lead on the pace set by rival Francis Joyon. A week later, during the worst storms of MacArthur's career, she badly burned her arm on a generator. MacArthur twice had to climb the 98-foot mast to repair mainsail damage.\n"What have I done wrong to deserve this?" she wrote in an e-mail Jan. 20. "Everything we worked so hard for we are losing. It is so unfair. It has never been so hard."\nStruggling in bad weather, MacArthur fell a day behind Joyon. By late January, she was back in contention after crossing the equator. Her 75-foot boat hit a large fish and nearly struck a whale, and then light winds threatened. A storm helped push her back in the lead.\nThe around-the-world record has been attempted only five times in a multihull, the fastest and most extreme class of boats on the ocean. Only one person has been successful: Joyon, who set the mark of 72 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes and 22 seconds, in February 2004.\nIn 2003, MacArthur failed in a bid to set the fastest nonstop circumnavigation of the globe when her mast broke in the Indian Ocean. Last June, shortly before embarking on her latest venture, MacArthur fell 75 minutes short of a solo trans-Atlantic record.\nNow a record of a different sort belongs to her.