Laura Dekker, the 14-year-old Dutch girl who wants to enter the record books as the youngest person to sail around the world single-handed, has officially started her voyage. She set out from Gibraltar in her boat the Guppy on Saturday morning.

Laura has spent the past two weeks in Portugal making final preparations for her journey. Although this prompted considerable media interest, few people were able to catch so much as a glimpse of her. She departed not from the Portuguese port of Portimao as the media expected, but from the British-owned territory of Gibraltar, situated at the mouth of the Mediterranean.

Laura’s manager had announced earlier that she would not speak to the media. During her journey, she will give interviews only to MasMedia, the company that has acquired exclusive rights to the voyage. MasMedia, which was the only media outlet to know the identity of her port of departure, has indicated that it will make pictures available to all media outlets on Sunday.

Her first stop will be either the Madeira Archipelago or the Canary Islands. There she will wait for the end of the hurricane season before setting out across the Atlantic towards Panama, where she will use the Panama Canal to cross to the Pacific. She intends to record the first section of her journey with hand-held cameras. At a later stage, fixed cameras will be installed on board.

At the end of July, Laura won a 10-month court battle with child welfare authorities in the Netherlands, who had been preventing the voyage for fear it would stunt her social and emotional development. It’s expected that she will use the time waiting for the hurricane season to study for her school exams.

The record she is attempting to break is currently held by the Australian Jessica Watson, who in May this year completed a solo voyage around the world just a few days before her seventeenth birthday.