Music is blaring out of a radio on a ladder and a team of tanned crew, sweating in shorts and polo shirts, are fixing pieces of equipment on the deck of a yacht. ‘I judge people on their reaction to meeting Maiden,’ warns Tracy Edwards, as we step into the shade of the boat shed. ‘She has her own personality.’

On a baking morning in Hamble, a yacht haven on the Solent in Hampshire, it’s as if history is repeating itself.

In the very same spot in 1988, a then 25-year-old Edwards begged and borrowed kit from around the yard to refit the boat that she had remortgaged her house for, and in which she would storm into the record books as the skipper of the first all-female crew to sail around the world.

When, almost three decades later, Edwards got an email to say her beloved Maiden had been abandoned and was in a dreadful state of repair in the Seychelles, she didn’t think twice. ‘I rang up my old project manager and said, “What are you doing?” He told me he was just about to retire, so I said, “No you’re not. I’ve found Maiden and we’re rescuing her.”’