I
have sailed across Poole Bay off
the English south coast outside
Bournemouth many times, but
never like this.
We were heading from the Old
Harry Rocks towards the Needles on
the western tip of the Isle of Wight,
playing around with the fresh
southwesterly breeze at an angle —
from side-on — where Pip Hare’s
boat develops its real power.
Having written about these 60ft
foiling flying machines for some
years, I thought I knew what was
coming next as Hare and her team
ran around setting up Medallia —
mainsail and foresail trim, keel and
foil angles, water ballast, mast
rotation. Then the skipper pressed a
couple of buttons on her remote
autopilot control strapped to her arm
and the boat took off.
In a few seconds the speed
increased from about 10mph to more
than 25 and, with it, the water being
forced up at the bow started
ricocheting through the air towards
us. Medallia was romping along, her
twin rudders fizzing as we whipped
past a couple of cruising yachts as if
they were at a standstill.
It was an astonishing example of
the raw power of Imoca yachts that
people like Hare — and there aren’t
many of them — attempt to race solo
around the world in the Vendée
Globe, and we were dealing with
relatively benign conditions, not a
gale in the Southern Ocean.
Normally the autopilot does the
work on these boats, but Hare gave
me the tiller for a few minutes, just to
get a feel for a machine that is now
relatively old within the Imoca ranks,dominated world of pro sailing. For
instance when Medallia goes into a big
refit next winter — when it will be
equipped with more powerful foils —
Hare is going to use the time to go
small-boat racing to improve her skills
and sharpen her competitiveness;
she’s not hiding her deficiencies, but
working on them.
“I am almost obsessively terrified of
the idea of wasting an opportunity
and I have this incredible opportunity
right now like never before, like never
ever in my life, to invest in myself,”
she said by way of explanation. “And I
know where I want to go and I know
what direction I want that to go in
and, all of a sudden, I’ve got the
support of a sponsor and I’ve got a
team around me and I can make that
happen. And if I don’t use that
opportunity to learn as much as I can
and become the sailor that I always
wanted to be, then I’ve just wasted it.”
It’s easy to get distracted by Hare’s
age. At 48, she is one of the oldest in
the Vendée Globe fleet. But great solo
sailors, like good wine, take years to
mature and the way she is talking now,
it would come as no surprise to see her
take on not just the 2024 VendéeThat race was a warm-up for what’s
coming next, the much more exacting
3,500-mile Vendée Arctique, which
starts tomorrow from the Bay of
Biscay resort of Les Sables d’Olonne
and takes the field of 25 solo sailors
up into the Arctic Circle and back.
Hare, the most down-to-earth
professional athlete you’ll ever meet,
can’t wait to show she can do better.
In the Bermudes 1000 she blew the
start and lost a lot of ground on the
leaders in the first few hours. It’s a
mistake she is not planning to repeat.
“I had the wrong sail up,” she said. “I
knew I had the wrong sail up and I
didn’t change it. I don’t know why I
didn’t do it. I just kept saying to
myself, ‘It takes an hour to change a
sail and by the time you have done it,
you’ll have to change back.’ It was
dumb and if I was coaching someone
else, I’d have said, ‘Come on, let’s do
it,’ and I didn’t.”
In that explanation you have all
you need to know about an honest
competitor, not afraid to admit her
mistakes and someone who is
determined to make the best of the
chance she now has, after years of
battling to the front in the male-‘My chance to be sailor I’ve wanted to be’
having been first launched in 2015 but
which still holds the 74-day Vendée
Globe record.
What you felt, from head to toe,
was the ridiculous power-to-weight
ratio produced by a super-light but
super-strong carbon-fibre hull, a
cloud of black sail canvas and a
plethora of go-faster gear, all aimed at
maximizing speed. A small heading
readjustment and the boat would
accelerate again; you could pull
against her as she surged forward,
skimming across white horses and
then bashing into the back of a wave
and blasting through it, sending
another bathload of water flying
towards the cockpit. Even the best
foul weather gear was not enough on
Medallia in this mood; you needed
what Hare was wearing, a drysuit
with rubber seals at neck and wrists.
“It’s brilliant to be able to share this
first hand,” said the 48-year-old
Englishwoman who grew up sailing
with her parents on the river Deben
in Suffolk and is now well on her way
to her second Vendée Globe, in 2024.
“That’s always been my beef with
this level of sailing. I know the boat is
worth a lot of money, but it’s always
‘hands off’, isn’t it? It’s always looking
in the distance, ‘You don’t belong
here, you cannot be a part of it.’ And
actually if we want people to invest
more in sailing and take it on board
as a more mainstream sport, we’ve
got to let people in and share it.”
Hare has just returned from the
Bermudes 1000, her first race in her
new boat, which she acquired in July
last year, having finished the most
recent Vendée Globe four months
earlier in 19th place out of 33 starters,
despite sailing the second-oldest boat
in the fleet. She was not happy with
her performance in the Bermudes, a
1,200-mile race that featured a loop
out into the Atlantic from the French
port of Brest. She finished 17th out of
24, a result that would have been a lot
better had she not incurred a 90-
minute penalty for accidentally
breaking the seal on her engine while
charging Medallia’s batteries.Globe but the one after that in 2028 in
a new boat, built for her and in which
she might aim to reach the podium.
In the meantime it’s about races
within races. Hare measures her
performance against the age of her
boat and against sailors in equivalent
machinery — people such as the
Italian sailor Giancarlo Pedote, the
Franco-German sailor Isabelle
Joschke and the Frenchmen Damien
Seguin, Romain Attanasio, Benjamin
Dutreux and Fabrice Amedeo.
“My goal is to be close to them,” she
said. “I think I’d really like to be top
ten in the Vendée Arctique. On paper
there are 14 boats faster than me in
the race. If I could be top ten, then I
know I am theoretically out-
performing my boat and that to me is
a good feeling.” It’s self-imposed
pressure from a woman who feels
obliged to repay the investment made
by her sponsor — a California-based
customer and employee experience
management company. “My sponsors
are so happy and just want the best
for me — I don’t want to let anyone
down,” she said.
One detail she wants to put right
from the Bermudes 1000 is the
transition just before the start of a
race when her shore team leave her
boat to let her get on with it. Hare
says she has struggled with that
process, as she switches from
worrying about what they are doing
to focusing entirely on herself and the
race. She says she needs to be more in
the zone when the gun goes.
“My preferred state is to be on my
own — then I am more focused,” she
said. “I am very, very internally
driven. I do not need other people
around me or on the water next to me
to find that in a performance. It’s
inside me. But because I am a
professional sailor, I have been
looking after people on boats all my
life. So whenever I have people with
me, I really struggle to just focus on
myself. I am always watching what
they are doing. But in the Vendée
Arctique we are definitely going to try
something different.”Ed Gorman goes on
board Medallia with
Pip Hare, as she gets
ready to take on the
tough Vendée Arctique
Hare, 48, on board her new boat Medallia, which she acquired in July last yearMedallia will
get a big refit
in the winter,
including some
brand new foilsMARK LLOYD FOR THE TIMESthe times | Saturday June 11 2022 1GS 19Sailing Sport