The Power of a Team

One of the things I find most challenging about returning to the shore is the feeling of a loss of agency, compared to my self-centred life afloat.

As a lone sailor on the ocean, I must take responsibility for every aspect of life. My actions, or lack of actions, have a direct consequence on not just performance but safety. If I want something to change, I must make that change. If I perceive a risk, I must take action to mitigate it. If there is an opportunity to excel, it is only down to me, my skill, energy, and decision-making that can bring those opportunities to fruition. A huge amount of energy and activity is not always repaid with results. But a lack of activity at the correct time will most likely be punished. This day-to-day, powerful ability to carve out my own path gives me the platform to perform as an athlete in a sport I have dedicated my life to.

But to get out on the water in a well-prepared, world-class ocean race boat takes years of hard work, dedication, and investment. I started out humbly in my career, racing the boats I had access to, preparing them myself. I took responsibility for as much as I possibly could, working around races and training to earn money to live. Working on my boat into the night to get it ready for the next event. It was relentless and exhausting, but I was able to create a career through hard work, and that felt good.

But there comes a time in many aspects of life when we can no longer achieve the goals we aspire to under our hard work alone. We must involve other people, to help share the load, to bring their expertise and experience to the table, to bring investment that will allow a project to thrive. And the minute we start working with other people, we lose that direct agency of making stuff happen instantly. We must trust and we must wait, and sometimes this makes me feel like I am not moving forwards at all.

Lifting Medallia out of the water to prepare for shipping

This month has been tough for me; I had to come back to the UK without a boat. I travelled to Les Sables d’Olonne and watched other skippers finish, and I am fully feeling the pressure of needing other people to help me get stuff done. Some days I don’t feel like I have moved forwards at all, and the waiting game is killing me.

My two main objectives for the month of February were to organise shipping the boat back to the UK, and to work on finding a sponsor or sponsors who would be excited enough about the Pip Hare Ocean Racing team to want to build a partnership over the next couple of years. Neither of these things I can make happen alone.

Like all professional sport in this age, we rely on commercial partnerships to provide the necessary funding and investment that allows Pip Hare Ocean Racing to compete at an international level in the world’s toughest Ocean Racing class. After six years of hard work and development, we hold the skill, ingenuity, and experience that allows us to compete with the world’s best, but in order to release our potential, we must find commercial partnerships to provide a steady income that will allow us to plan and execute a solid four-year performance pathway. I have always struggled with “selling” our team. I know how good we are; I know we are strong, we have achieved incredible success over the last six years, both from a sporting, community, and business perspective, and with coaching over time, I have learned how to talk about our success and not be embarrassed or feel like a fraud. The hardest thing with selling a commercial partnership is that no matter how good your pitch, how receptive the audience, the smiles, nods, kind words at the end of a presentation, you cannot get a deal signed through hard work alone. At some point, you send the email, hang up the phone, or leave the room, and then you can have no more control or influence over what happens next. The waiting is terrible. Waiting for a reply, waiting for a meeting date, waiting for a decision, and during that time, what can a person do to make a difference? Nothing.

Sometimes, after seemingly great meetings, you never hear from people again. Your calls are screened, emails unanswered. You will never know why. Sometimes, after months of negotiations and effort, the answer comes back, No. And you will wonder what you did or didn’t do to make it go the wrong way. All too often your communications never receive a response. Did they even arrive? Were they read? Did anyone have a vague interest? Who knows?

As a person of action, someone who will work their way through a problem, I find this part of running a sports team incredibly hard. To spend weeks of effort on a presentation that does not even receive a response is the exact opposite of being the skipper in a solo ocean race. At some point, all agency is lost, you are in the hands of often unknown, unseen actors, and it is impossible to influence those we can’t reach. But we cannot exist without commercial partners, and I believe the future of our team is strong. So despite the painful lack of results, the same work ethic must apply whether changing a sail or requesting meetings, and we must believe that the results of the past will be a good enough reference for investment in the future.

But relying on others to get stuff done is not always about shouting into the wind. Once again, the great sailing community of Melbourne has demonstrated that people are awesome. After a month of hard fundraising through various events, we finally secured enough funds to ship the boat back from Australia, and I packed my bags with lifting strops, two huge bean bags, and some foil clamps, then flew back to Melbourne with my 70kg of very odd luggage.

I had booked the boat on a ship for the end of February, and we now needed to take the keel and the foils off to prepare for loading. This is no mean feat, on the other side of the world, without a cradle or a yard or the usual team of experts we have done this exercise with over the last four years. I had been looking for a yard to lift the boat out since arriving in Melbourne and was starting to despair at the lack of facilities that could accommodate a boat with our beam and depth. Then at the last minute, I was introduced to Adam Manders, a sailor (of course) and also Ship Manager for Strait Link – the shipping line which runs between Tasmania and Melbourne. Adam heard of my predicament and suggested we might be able to use the Strait Link berth overnight, between one ship leaving and the other one arriving. As well as their containers as a temporary cradle to hold the boat while we took the keel off.

With only one week of notice, we pulled together a team of volunteers, hired a crane and gantries, had method statements, risk assessments, and permits signed off, and we were ready to go. I arrived early and managed site visits, filled the bean bags, helped by volunteers who are still picking polystyrene beans out of their hair, then Joff and Ollie from our team flew out for the big night. We left our berth in Docklands at 1615, accompanied by a RIB on loan from the Royal Brighton Yacht Club, and made our way down to the commercial docks, where the first team of volunteers had arrived. Driving into the dock, Medallia felt tiny amongst the behemoth ships. Out of place among cranes and containers.

The Strait Link team had placed two containers 8 m apart, on which the boat would sit with the keel in the middle. The clock was ticking from our moment of arrival, and it was tense work. While the crane set up, the shore team placed our bean bags on top of the containers, then the boat was lifted and placed on top of the bean bags. As soon as the boat was secured, two teams worked on getting foils out. Foils supported by the crane, one team on a scissor lift outside, one team inside the boat lowering and releasing. It took around four hours to get both foils out and on deck. It got dark, and we continued under the flood lights. Pizzas arrived, the volunteer crews changed. Next, the keel had to come off. The crew outside placed two gantries on either side of the keel, then took the weight of the bulb on chain blocks. The team inside worked to loosen keel bolts, which fought us every step of the way. Eventually, the keel was lowered out of the boat at around 0230, and by 0300, we were back in the water, with two hours to spare before the ship got back. The boat was back in its berth at 0430 after an epic 12 hours, then Paul, the volunteer RIB driver, still had an hour to get back to his berth.

It is incredible to think of what we achieved with such a short run-up and so far from home. It would not have been possible at all without the effort, energy, and passion of so many people. It continues to humble and amaze me that complete strangers are willing to put themselves out, work all night, and pull in favours on my behalf. It is the complete opposite of my ‘waiting for a reply’ pain. I couldn’t get the keel out with my own hard work, but I didn’t need to because so many other people had my back.

I started out as a lone sailor; my personal traits are not easy to guess. I like action, I work hard, I am fiercely independent and hate to rely on others or ask for help. Over the last six years of building our IMOCA team, I have learned the power of working with others and how performance and results are exponentially increased when a well-functioning team all lean their shoulders to the wheel. Since my dismasting, I have relied on the actions of many other people to help get us closer to racing again. Whether that is through fundraising, guiding me in through the Port Philip heads, emptying bean bags in the middle of the night in France, picking us up from the airport, researching crane hire, lending a physical hand, lending boats, lending tools, lending a kind word. Our team has become huge, it stretches around the world, and together we are moving forwards. The lucky sponsor that ends up with us will be locking in to a bigger force than they can possibly imagine.

At the time of writing this blog, I am hopeful we will get on a ship early in March. Once again, it has not been an easy ride. The days since removing the keel were back to the painful wait, as I can’t pick the boat up and put it on a ship myself. Finally, today, I think we have made some ground.

Pipx

The race is over but this story is not.