Victoria Murden McClure (born March 6, 1963[1]) is an athlete, adventurer, chaplain, lawyer, and university administrator who was the first woman and the first American to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean, which she did in 1999.
McClure was born in Brooksville, Florida[1] and as a child moved to Connecticut and then to Pennsylvania.
[4] Thirty-six years old at the time,[5] she rowed for eighty-one days, traveling 4,767 kilometres (2,962 mi), starting from the Canary Islands and finishing at Guadeloupe on December 3, 1999.
She wrote a memoir about her experiences, A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean, published by HarperCollins in 2009.
McClure has also worked as a chaplain at Boston City Hospital, the executive director of a shelter for homeless women, and a public policy analyst for the Mayor of Louisville, and she worked for the boxer and humanitarian Muhammad Ali.