2010: Jessica Watson, solo sailor

THE girl with a fear of the ocean, a fear of water, who sailed 24,285 nautical miles around the world. They're making a movie about it now.

IT'S foggy now, a seven-month blur of waves as tall as telephone poles, Southern Ocean storms that turned her upside down and orange dawns so wondrous they made her scream with delight.

But Jessica Watson remembers this clearly: a brief metaphysical moment that occurred on the night of May 15, 2010, when she switched on the TV to see footage of herself sailing into Sydney Harbour earlier that day, greeted by 1600 support boats and an estimated 100,000 people lining the harbour foreshore, celebrating the 16-year-old Sunshine Coast girl who had just become the youngest person to sail solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world.

"I remember seeing it and going, 'Oh my God, if that wasn't me, that girl would be so cool'!" Watson's spitfire giggle echoes through an empty Mooloolaba Yacht Club, still one hour from opening its doors to its weekday morning regulars. "It was just too weird to see," the 20-year-old says. "But I thought, 'Gosh, if that girl actually wasn't me, I'd be fascinated by her'. That's how it is. That's how I look back on it.

"I hate watching videos of myself. I cringe, 'Oh my god, my accent's terrible, I look like an idiot'. But I'll always remember that one moment on the evening I got back. You're normally picking it apart - 'Should have done this, should have done that' - but every now and then you remember a moment like that and you go, 'That was cool'."

It was extraordinary. It was beautiful. The girl with a fear of the ocean, a fear of water, who sailed 24,285 nautical miles around the world. They're making a movie about it now. She laughs about the rumour of Nicole Kidman playing her mum, Julie.

She likes the script. But a movie could never do her achievement justice. Could never capture just how terrifying it is to be fastened into a lap belt as a Southern Ocean storm drives your tiny pink vessel upside down into a seething black wave gully. Could never properly capture the sea-sense she developed out there on her own, how she learnt to feel wave patterns, hear wind changes; how she smelled the land as she neared the Australian coastline; how home had a distinct scent that made her spirit soar.

She shared her deepest thoughts with a wind-vane she christened Parker. She washed herself for seven months with a bucket of salt water. She re-read messages scrawled on the walls of her boat. "Don't worry about us worrying about you because that's stupid and complicated," wrote her younger brother, Tom. Her dad, Roger, kept his message brief: "Be brave. Be strong."

"I was so caught up in it," she says, shaking her head, her elbows propped on a wooden bar table. "I was so audacious and single-mindedly focused on the goal. Because I'm not so focused on that goal anymore I'm able to see past it, see the other sides to it."

She's been thinking a lot lately about how her parents must have been feeling back home, never quite certain that their daughter would ever make it back to them. "I realised how kinda selfish I was," she smiles. "What I put them through."

Jessica looks out to the Mooloolaba Marina, where she learned to sail. This is home. As a young girl she stood for hours on this dock watching yachts settle into their berths. She'd offer to tie down the ropes of old sea dogs and often she was ignored, the rope being tossed to someone older, with more arm muscle, more swagger.

"I've changed so much because of it," she says. "If I took on every compliment I've received in the last three years my head would be the size of Jupiter."

In December 2011, Jessica etched a few more lines into sailing's record books, skippering the youngest crew to ever compete in the Sydney to Hobart race. She was awarded the Jane Tate Memorial Trophy for being the first female skipper across the finish line. "I was really proud of that," she says. "I'm an offshore cruising sailor. When it came to sailing fast and racing, I had no clue. We worked really hard for it."

Lately, she's given herself a new challenge: completing a communications and sociology degree while managing a diary of charity appearances, talks and sponsorship commitments that "haven't slowed down since I sailed around the world". It's a challenge made more interesting by the dyslexia that has plagued her studies since childhood. "The spelling!" she sighs. "I'm not particularly academic but I really want to get it done. I have mates who do it 10 times as fast as me and that's a bit annoying. But there's something I learnt years and years ago and that's to just put that extra bit of effort in."

She wants to be a youth worker, work with disadvantaged kids; at-risk kids facing their own kind of ocean squalls. "A normal job," she says. "It sounds so boring. I think people feel let down when I tell them that. But that's what I want to do one day.

"The one thing that really has irked me is the question, 'What are you doing next?' The problem was all my plans never seemed as big and dramatic and exciting. So people would stop me and say, 'Well, surely you're going to go to the moon now?' Why would I want to? Why do I need to? Why do I need to better that? I'm happy with what I've done."

Her mum, Julie, arrives at the yacht club with a shirt Jessica asked her to bring down for The Weekend Australian Magazine's photo shoot. Julie remembers the heated criticism she and her Roger were subjected to in the lead-up to Jessica's voyage. They were accused of everything from stage-parenting to child neglect; there were media reports about Queensland's Department of Child Safety threatening to stop the record attempt. What the world didn't realise was the amount of preparation the family had done, a process that began two years before Jessica even announced her bold dream. Roger Watson got to know his daughter's vessel, Ella's Pink Lady, so intimately he pictured her hull screws and nuts and bolts in his sleep.

Jessica stands up at the table, ready to find a room in the yacht club where she can change into the new shirt for the photo shoot. Before she departs she remembers another one of those cool post-sail moments. "One of the best things ever was a young girl who came up to me at a book signing and she said, 'Your book inspired me to change schools and join the chess club.' She had done that and she was happy about that.

"It's really very very simple. It's about what you can achieve if you set your mind to it. I was just an ordinary girl who couldn't sail and was scared of the water. And look what I did. I like the simple message in that."

ALSO IN 2010:
* Julia Gillard becomes Australia's first woman PM, deposing Kevin Rudd
* Federal election results in hung parliament; Labor governs with help of Greens and independents
* Mary MacKillop becomes Australia's first saint
* Ken Wyatt becomes first Aborigine elected to House of Representatives
* Angus and Julia Stone win five ARIAs; best album Down the Way
* MasterChef judge Matt Preston wins Logie for outstanding new talent
* Richard Champion de Crespigny safely lands Qantas superjumbo at Singapore after the plane suffers catastrophic engine failure