An interview with… my Mum

Solo sailing is of course all about being on your own. But no matter what race I’m competing in, I never really feel alone. It’s so important to have a good support network around you and my family have always been my biggest supporters. In this latest blog post my Mum, Mary, shares her experience of sailing and watching me compete as I approach the Vendee Globe 2020.

What are your first memories of Pip being on the water and how did she get into sailing?

Pip’s number three in a family of four, she has two older sisters and a younger brother and there’s only 5.5 years between the four of them so they were always a close-knit group. My husband and I bought our first boat (a non-engine Folkboat) before we bought our first house, and we were cruising sailors.

We lived in Cambridgeshire and kept the boat on the River Deben in Suffolk. We added a red Mirror dinghy, and that’s how Pippa learned to sail; in non-engine boats, on an East Coast river, with vicious tides, and difficult entries and exits. It’s a marvellous sailing ground to learn about the sea and what it does, with Harwich Harbour and Felixstowe and the wonderful playground of Walton Backwaters. It was lovely. We then bought a Moody 33 so everybody could sleep on it and that’s when we started seriously cruising in the school holidays.

Our main ground was across the North Sea to the Netherlands up the Dutch coasts and inland to lakes and waters, and our favourite place was the Frisian Islands, which are wonderful.

How did you know Pip was going to sail professionally?

She’s always shown a keen interest in sailing, and was sailing the Mirror dinghy from the age of about six. She has always had a cast iron stomach too. We’d be sailing across the choppy North Sea into a head wind, all of us would be sitting out there and Pippa would be playing with her Cindy dolls and making us all cups of tea.

By the time she was taking her A Levels she was skippering in the RYA Young Skippers Scheme and was a lead skipper for a group of non-engine boats. But she didn’t really get into sailing until she took a gap year from university. The RYA named her young skipper of the year and sent her off on the Lord Nelson on a delivery trip to the Canary Islands and she never looked back – you could say she ran away to sea.

She was briefly the youngest yacht master in the country at the age of 18 and then she started with Sunsail and went off to the Caribbean where she worked in their charter fleet. She delivered yachts single handed from Caribbean island to island and that’s where she started single handed sailing. She then did a trip on a big yacht from Trinidad to New Zealand and spent a couple of years in New Zealand sailing and it went from there.

Is it something that runs in the family?

Her granddad, Bunny Hare, was a keen racing sailor and an avid sportsman. He taught PE and was a dinghy racer on the River Deben, renowned for his competitiveness. We sailed with him in Burns week in the non-rated cruise class and would win every year. Pippa’s grandmother was also a sportswoman so it runs in the family but skipped a generation.

Watching Pip’s career progress - what’s been your proudest moment?

The most amazing thing was when she went into the OSTAR in 2009, we were all every excited, the whole family came down to Plymouth and watched her go off. Beyond Fastnet, about 500 miles west of Ireland there was a horrendous storm and she broke rigging. They changed the rules so you could put in and get a repair, you got penalised but you could go back into the race. She managed with difficulty, and I think a broken rib, and crept into the tip of Ireland to meet my husband and her coach to get the rigging repair done. She set off again into the race and her mindset was ‘I know I can’t be up there with the winners so I’m going to pick them off one by one’. When she got to Newport, Rhode Island, she had overtaken seven yachts from 500+ miles behind. Her sister and I flew out to see her come in and she didn’t know. We went out in a Rib and whisked round behind her boat at Rhode Island and the view, seeing her boat and spinnaker up with the sunset behind her… it was jaw dropping. Watching her go towards the sunset was a most choking moment, seeing her after all that drama and coming in at the end of this race not having won, but having triumphed over adversity and done so well… it was a really great moment.

What are your thoughts on the upcoming Vendee Globe race?

This is not just a race it’s a personal challenge for Pippa that she achieves sailing around the world single handed. Before she did OSTAR she sailed single handed from Uruguay to Felixstowe, which took 58 days or something like that, so she can do those distances. She can apply herself and of course she would like to do well but it’s a personal challenge to get round and do it.  This is something I think we’ve all realised that sooner or later she would want to do, and as a family we are all very excited about it and very happy for her. All of us are greatly admiring of her ability to communicate - she’s a great communicator, a great writer and everything she does is very ‘me to you’, her blogs and videos are for people who are keen sailors and people who don’t sail at all.

What do you think of this is a platform to showcase women in sport?

I think it provides a good chance to promote women in sport and that’s incredibly important. I’m very keen for women to achieve in whatever field they choose (not just sport). My mother was the first woman in her family to have a graduate education and the first woman in her family to go to college and she was an achiever at a time when women were not. We have a family of fairly strong women in their own right, that’s not to say the men aren’t, but there is a tradition of trying to be good at something and achieving in whatever profession it is whether that’s sport or not.

In your opinion, what personality traits does Pip have that will help her sail solo around the world?

Pippa knows herself, she knows her strengths and failings and she can be disciplined about how she does things and what she does. She keeps herself fit and mentally able as well, she doesn’t lose sight of the goal – I remember someone on the original OSTAR complaining she was reading a novel and dropped it in the bilge and couldn’t read it, Pippa’s response was ‘what is she doing reading a book? She’s sailing.’ She will be focusing on what’s going on in the race the entire way round.

What do you think will be her biggest challenge?

Keeping her strength up and remembering to eat. People do lose a lot of weight doing a race like this, and that takes its toll and there will be times I’m sure when things look very black but she knows how to work at doing small things and achieving bit by bit instead of throwing it all away.

I know she knows how to cope in the most difficult of situations. This is a big race and the Southern Ocean is an unknown, but she has sailed through difficult times in boats and she is experienced and she comes from that period of time before we had trackers and things to follow people, so you have to trust she knows what she’s doing. She will sit down and think things through when they go wrong and work at it bit by bit to find a way out.

Can you describe how it feels to watch Pip sail?

 It’s where she wants to be. She’s happy and content and in awe of her surroundings.

What do you love about sailing?

Whether you’re competitive sailing or cruising, it’s always competition in a way because you are always pitting yourself against the wind, the tide, the weather. It’s wonderful out there, on the sea or even on a river. Being at one with what’s going on, there are so many things you appreciate – when you’re night sailing you can’t believe what the sky is like and watching shooting stars and thunderstorms in the distance. You can find the most remote of places especially on the East Coast and there are anchorages where you can be the only boat there overnight. You can swim off the boat, be quiet, be your own person.