By Julia Jones and Nick Cottam
The Vendée Globe is a single-handed, non-stop, non-assisted round-the-world sailing race that takes place every four years. It is contested on IMOCA monohulls, which are 18 metres long. The skippers set off from Les Sables-d’Olonne in Vendée and sail around 45,000 kilometres around the globe, rounding the three legendary capes (Good Hope, Leeuwin and finally Cape Horn) before returning to Les Sables d’Olonne. The race has acquired an international reputation, attracting skippers from all over the world. Beyond the competition, it is above all an incredible human adventure.
The start of the 2024-2025 edition is November 10th. It’s a very French race but this year there will also be competitors from Switzerland, Hungary, Great Britain, Italy, New Zealand, Japan, USA, Belgium, Germany and for the first time from China.
Among them will be Pip Hare who learned to sail on the Deben and whose parents live near Woodbridge.
It’s hard really to overstate what a challenge this race is: enormous, spartan, high tech yachts many of them capable of foiling at high speeds racing through the toughest seas on the planet, each of them managed only by a single person.
This is the second time Pip has taken part. On her first attempt, in an elderly boat, on a minimal budget (in race terms!) she confounded all expectations by finishing in 19th position, 13 places above her boat’s ranking. She became the 8th woman and the 10th British sailor in history ever to finish this incredible race and came to Woodbridge to talk about it. Nick Cottam was there and wrote a profile of Pip for the Suffolk Magazine which we are reprinting here, with kind permission of the editor.
Nick Cottam:
A peaceful day at Waldringfield on the River Deben some years ago and a young girl is learning to sail with her siblings. As the tide turns and a gentle breeze ripples across the water Pip Hare is enjoying her time at the helm of the family Mirror Dinghy Leveret. Fast forward some 30 years and Pip is still at the helm, this time alone and doing battle with the mountainous seas of the Southern Ocean as she competes in the Vendee Globe, arguably the world’s most gruelling single-handed yacht race.
“Maintenance and repairs were part of daily life during the race. Whenever possible, I tried to carry out work without impeding the boat’s performance. This often meant working in odd places, clipped on while Superbigou screamed along.”
(From Pip’s book In My Element, describing her first Vendee experience.
Thanks to publishers Adlard Coles for permission to include here.)
(Superbigou was renamed Medallia.)
Since setting out from Les Sables D’Olonne on the west coast of France on the 8th November 2020 Pip has covered thousands of miles, battling some of the harshest conditions imaginable in her 60 foot yacht Medallia. Just after midnight on Thursday 12th February, the 47-year-old became only the eighth woman ever to finish the race, sailing triumphantly back into Les Sables D’Olonne 95 days after leaving the French port and finishing in a creditable 19th place in one of the oldest yachts in the race. En route, Pip has had to overcome such challenges as replacing her rudder in the Southern Ocean, coping with a severe reaction to a jellyfish sting and climbing the mast on two separate occasions to carry out urgent repairs.
It is a far cry from the gentle rivers of East Anglia and as her mother Mary notes “Be careful what you wish for when you teach an enthusiastic youngster to sail.” After a particularly tough home stretch, tracking back north up the Atlantic through some of the worst weather in the race, Pip puts the challenge of finishing the 24,000 mile Vendee Globe in perspective. “More men have walked on the moon than women have completed the Vendee Globe race,” she says “and I am over the moon to make a dent in that statistic. I loved being out there and I want to be out there again. I love sailing because men and women can race on equal terms. And the Vendee is a real leveler – yes sailing these boats does need strength, but it also needs brains and tactics.”
“Moving sails around the boat was an incredibly physical exercise. When wet, the bags could weigh more than I did. I was constantly working against gravity and the motion of the boat.”
In other words, fitness, diet, strength and the sheer dedication of showing enough racing prowess to get to the start line of the Vendee Globe are just part of the challenge. “Sailing offshore over long distances is like a game of chess,” says Pip “but with the added excitement of weather and sea state. You have to try and predict what the weather will do, what your best course is through it and what other competitors are doing. And you need to do this in three months around the world in different oceans on your own.” Diet she says was particularly important both as part of her pre-race training and during the race itself she needed to consume an average of 4000 calories a day with limited time to prepare and eat her food. “I knew I’d lose about 10kg during the race so I started with that extra weight. But it went so I had to keep well-fuelled and use a range of freeze-dried meals, nut-butter-based nutrition and dried fruit, as well as lots of tea. And sleep? “When everything was going well I was able to nap for up to 30 or 40 minutes regularly. But when there were issues to deal with, or the weather got bad, that was hard to do and fatigue becomes a real problem which is when you make race-ending mistakes.”
It is no surprise that the Vendee is known as the Everest of ocean racing. As well as being single-handed the race is nonstop and unassisted for the skippers taking part. Since it was founded in 1989, the Vendee course has been completed by under 100 sailors, including another British woman, Ellen McArthur, who battled her way to second across the line in February 2001. The current record time of 74 days was set by the 2017 winner Armel Le Cléac’h. Pip Hare’s achievement in completing the race crowns years of success in sailing and offshore racing.
“I first heard about the Vendee Globe when I was about 16,” she says “and it struck a chord.”
Pip at the finish line.
Pip’s sailing CV is impressive by any standards and is a credit in part at least to her East Anglian and Suffolk roots. After all that early fun in the family Mirror she joined the RYA’s Young Skipper scheme and went on to become the UK’s youngest Yacht Master at the age of 19. After being advised not to take up a place at University to do a Sports Science degree because she knew too much already (!) she took a more practical route, delivering boats around the Caribbean, skippering for Sunsail and winning consistently as a racer. She later took an Open University Degree in Modern Languages (French, Spanish and English), undertaking much of her academic work at sea. In 2009 Pip competed in the Original Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race (OSTAR) from Plymouth to Newport Rhode Island, finishing a creditable 15th despite having to put into port for rigging repairs.
Before the OSTAR, she had already proved herself a more than competent single-hander, sailing alone back from Montevideo to Ipswich – a total of 7500 miles in 58 days. “I needed to prove to myself that I was capable of sailing across the ocean. My engine gear box broke so I had to sail every mile but it gave me the confidence to say now I can race.” And race she could, competing short haul in numerous classes at Cowes and doing well over longer distances in such events as the two-handed around Britain and Ireland race.
Pip first heard about the Vendee when she was 16 and it immediately struck a chord. Fundraising, qualifying, completing were all a challenge but as soon as that first race was completed, she began looking ahead to doing it again — this year 2024/25 — with a bigger budget, a faster boat and the means to be up there among the world’s very best. She adds: “I also hope that other women can see my journey to the Vendee – which hasn’t been conventional – and be inspired that there’s a place for them in the elite part of the sport.”
JJ: Pip Hare is now 50. I had the privilege of meeting her recently and found her most impressively focused, modest and approachable. Her new boat, also named Medallia is almost mind-bogglingly high tech — it’s hard to think of anything further removed from a Mirror dinghy off Waldringfield. One thing I certain is that she should take the good wishes of all of us with her on her journey round the world — and we’ll spare a thought for her parents as they follow every tense moment ‘Be careful what you wish for when you teach a youngster to sail’ — yes indeed!
Pip Hare in 2022.
(Photo: Jean-Louis Carli.)
Julia Jones
Julia Jones is the editor of The Deben magazine.
Nick Cottam
Nick Cottam is a local author, journalist and lover of river walks, jogs and the occasional wild swim. He’s well known for his book ‘Life on the Deben’. Nick’s current project, ‘Walking the Deben Way’ follows the course of the river (as closely as possible) from source to mouth.