AS POOLE sailor Pip Hare stormed across the Vendee Globe finish line at Les Sables-d’Olonne in France in the early hours on February 12 she completed 95 days on the world’s oceans.

In reality, this was a journey 30 years in the making and one not without obstacles.

Speaking during an interview for the Daily Echo’s podcast, The Echo Dispatch, she said: “I really fixated on it when I was in my late teens. I grew up in Cambridgeshire, so completely land locked and I was lucky enough to have access to sailing from when I was a baby because my grandfather had this old 24 foot wooden boat that he kept on the east coast, so as a family we used to go spend time with him and go out sailing on his boat.

“When he died my parents inherited it, so we kind of used to sail on the odd weekend and we used to do family holidays sailing but it wasn’t something if I had grown up somewhere like Poole it would have been amazing having access to the water all of the time.

Bournemouth Echo: Poole sailor Pip HarePoole sailor Pip Hare

“In my late teens I think I fully understood what sailing could offer to me as a person. All the opportunity to travel, to go to remote places but also the challenge and the adventure and all of these incredible races that were going on and I was reading about them.

“I came across the Vendee Globe when I was 17 and I started reading every book I could find about ocean racing but all the people in these books, they were all about men.

“All of my heroes were men and then I read about the Vendee Globe race and first thought was this is an incredible race, it has got to be the toughest thing you could possibly imagine, 60 foot boats, one person, non-stop, but even better than that was the fact that women were competing on equal terms with the men and it was the first time I had actually read about a woman sailor in those terms and I just from that moment looked at it and said ‘I am going to do that’. It just took me a while.”

Being interviewed after the gruelling ocean race, Pip said it was the mental toll which took longer to recover from than the physical challenge.

However, it was not simply a case of signing up for the race and making her way to the start line. Plotting a course through elite sport is not as easy as some might think.

Discussing some of the difficulties she faced along the way to reaching the top of her craft, Pip said: “I think the difficult thing for me was actually finding a way to gain the skills and the experience to do it.

“But also I am not a particularly confident person and as a woman in the ocean racing world I am in a serious minority, so the difficult for me was actually vocalising that to other people because I just thought I would be laughd at or overlooked or people would tell me I couldn’t do it.

“It took me quite a long time to actually say out loud to anybody this is something that I want to do. And, of course, you can’t do it without actually telling people you want to do it, so that was the hardest bit.”

It did not take Pip long to turn her attention to the future. Within days of completing her first Vendee Globe, she had her eyes on the 2024 race.

She said: “I thought it was really important when I finish this race that I knew what my plan was going forward and I had some ambitions and goals because I had been so focused for two-and-a-half years. The Vendee has been everything. It has been my everything, so when you take away that intense thing, there is a big hole there.

“I wanted to make sure I filled that hole with something and I knew what I was going to do. I finished the race having loved it but also knowing that I could do better. I know so much more now. I am a better sailor now, so I desperately wanted to take that forwards. Objective number one was the Vendee in 2024.”