‘As the bow touched down the noise was different… In two seconds my race was over’ – Pip Hare’s Vendée disaster

When Pip Hare dismasted in the 2024 Vendée Globe her race ended – but her story didn’t. Pip tells the tale of her remarkable 800-mile self rescue

In the early hours of 15 December 2024, midway between Australia and Antarctica, my second Vendée Globe race came to a devastating end when my IMOCA Medallia dismasted. It still seems crazy that such a complex situation could be summed up in one sentence.

Almost exactly halfway through the most competitive solo round the world race ever, I had truly found my stride and worked my way up to 15th in the 40-strong fleet, ranking 2nd among the 2016-generation boats.

The Indian Ocean had been brutal for the pack I was racing in. It was my first experience of sailing big Southern Ocean conditions in a foiling IMOCA and I was learning every day about how to thrive. Our small peloton had been stuck in relentless winds and waves for two weeks, but we were heading out of the worst and rapidly catching the group of newer boats ahead.

At the time of dismasting I was waiting for the centre of a depression to pass over me. The wind had been light but was steadily building. The boat was not particularly powered up – reaching with a J2 jib and full main.

Medallia was flying, lifting out of the water on the leeward foil, surging forwards, the bow coming back down each time with a familiar crash. We flew and landed, flew and landed, then flew – but as the bow touched down the noise was different. I looked up through the cockpit bubble to see the mainsail falling towards me, deflected off the coachroof above. In two seconds my race was over.

It’s hard to describe the multitude of feelings that buried me in that moment: shock, disbelief and utter devastation. I felt sick, I was trembling, I wanted to curl up in a ball and stop the world from turning for even one more second.

So many people had put so much energy into the four years building up to this Vendée Globe. It was failure and it hurt more than I could have imagined.

I contacted my team, who set the wheels in motion to communicate what had happened to the race committee, sponsors, supporters, followers and the press. Meanwhile I was alone on the Southern Ocean, and there was no time to give in to any sort of emotion. I needed to take control.

The most important rule of seamanship is to prevent your situation from deteriorating. The most immediate risk was presented by the jagged broken carbon mast bashing against the hull. In just 20 minutes since the dismasting the wind had strengthened and I knew the sea state would build rapidly. I needed to work quickly to separate the debris from the hull.

Freeing the boat

IMOCAs have a wing mast which sits on a ball joint on deck with two deck spreaders. The lateral shrouds are ECsix, a type of rigging made from bundles of carbon rods enclosed in a fabric cover. Forestays and backstays are composite rigging cables. I had three forward stays up at the time of dismasting: the structural J2 stay, the J3 staysail furled, as was the J0 on the end of the bowsprit.

To release the mast I’d need to cut or unplug all these stays, as well as free the mainsail from the boom.

I carry a battery-powered angle grinder and a hacksaw. The angle grinder is always loaded with a cutting disc and has two fully charged batteries ready to go. My hacksaw is a standard full size saw with a brand-new metal blade loaded – I also had a full pack of spare blades.

I decided to start with the hacksaw, to understand the loads and see how difficult it would be to work safely with the motion of the boat before deploying a powered blade.

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After surveying the situation I decided to salvage the furlers from the forward sails, then cut the windward rigging, then leeward rigging, then the boom. I managed the forward sails quickly, then moved to the windward shrouds. The hacksaw made light work of the carbon rigging. As soon as the windward stays were cut, the deck spreader was free and I knew I’d banked a way to make my jury rig.

With the windward rigging released the mast debris that had gone over the side moved closer to the boat, possibly because the top of the mast was able to sink.

This meant the stump started to hit the hull more aggressively. I realised the halyards and wiring loom that ran up through the centre of the mast were very loaded and connected the piece of mast in the water to the piece on the deck, holding the stump into the hull. I started to cut at the halyards with my knife, but cutting through Dyneema line is not fast, and the blade blunts quickly.

I switched to the hacksaw and under tension a sharp serrated hacksaw blade made light work of halyards and trip lines, and both wiring looms. It was a big learning point on how a hacksaw can be a versatile tool.

Once the two sections of mast were separated, the weight of the debris shifted on to the boom. It took a while to cut through all of the lines connecting the boom, mast and mainsail and there was a constant pressure pulling the boom towards the crushed lifelines on the side deck. This was the hardest part of the whole procedure and where I had to take most care of my safety, ensuring I was always cutting from windward to avoid being dragged overboard if the boom suddenly loaded up.

With hindsight, I should have cut the mainsail free first.

The work to cut the rig free took less than an hour and during that time I found a sense of calm and almost content. Adrenaline plays a massive role in our survival during these extreme moments, not only negating fatigue and physical weakness but keeping your mind sharp and allowing quick decision making.

I was surprised how calm I felt when I returned to Medallia’s cabin to message my shore team and tell them the situation was contained. It was approaching midnight in Europe, both I and the boat were safe, so I suggested the team got some sleep.

Jury rig

I had a clear picture of how I’d make a jury rig mast using a deck spreader. I could use the ball joint as the mast step and attach three stays to the eyes of the old shrouds. Setting up the forestay and backstays was quick and easy: I put a snatch block on the bow to make a forestay using my spinnaker snuffer downline. Then I used existing backstay blocks, with extensions to the runner tails, to make backstays. All the stays were quickly attached with soft shackles.

The tough part was going to be keeping the foot of my new mast in place during stepping. I put a neoprene balaclava from my cold weather kit over the ball joint to make it softer and less slippery, then tied a jib control line around the ball joint.

This line came out through a central hole in the deck and so held the bottom of the new ‘mast’ centrally, and allowed me to apply some down force to the mast step while pulling it into place. I made a halyard for the storm jib using a carabiner as a turning block.

Erecting the mast was easier than I expected. With the ball joint held in place, I pushed the deck spreader out to the windward side of the boat, then took it in turns applying tension to the forestay, downline and leeward backstay. Once everything was highly loaded, I went on deck and started to use the roll of the waves to bounce the mast into the air.

There was a lot of to and fro, but slowly I could throw the mast upwards, each time it fell to a position further and further off the deck. Finally it was high enough that I could use the leeward backstay to wind it into position, then wound on the forestay to add height.

Once up, I secured it firmly alongside the original mast step with a ratchet strap. Next I hoisted the storm jib, and within three hours of my dismasting I was sailing again.

It was then I hit a wall of emotion and exhaustion that knocked me hard. The crippling feelings of loss and guilt at my race ending were intensified by the incredible isolation of being alone, in a cold, wet and stricken boat in one of the most remote places on the planet. For one day and one night I was unable to do anything except sit and cry and sleep. It was a dark 24 hours.

But in solo ocean racing, consumption by self-pity is not a long-term option. I was the only person that could make things better. I was safe, with plenty of food and the means to generate power and water. The boat was sound and functioning. I was not in danger; I was simply inconvenienced. I still had 170lt of diesel which could provide a range of around 200 miles. I even had Starlink and a Netflix subscription. Life was not that bad.

Far from being helpless, it was clear I could in fact make things better. So I decided to pour my energy into making my jury-rigged IMOCA as efficient as possible and my journey to the shore as professional as my race had been. Over the next 13 days I turned my ingenuity and skills to this task and documented it in daily videos, in a YouTube series I called ‘The slow boat to Melbourne’.

Finding safe harbour

Although the closest large port was Hobart, I opted to sail an extra 150 miles north and make Melbourne my destination. Choosing a large shipping port in mainland Australia seemed more sensible for shipping either a spare mast to Medallia, or the boat back to Europe.

But to get to Melbourne I’d need to stay well upwind of Tasmania, which if passed too close could become a dangerous lee shore in the prevailing westerlies.

I adapted my usual routing software to reflect new speeds and wind angles – reducing the polar percentage to 12-15% of maximum and restricting the maximum upwind angle to 80°, but allowing software to send me dead downwind. Over time I was able to increase my polars to 20% in good conditions.

I needed to change the geometry on the storm jib to make any progress reaching or with the wind ahead of the beam. Because the mast was short, the tack position for the jib was a long way forwards, which rotated the whole sail aft. This meant when the existing clew was sheeted on to maximum, it was touching the deck. I didn’t want to permanently damage the storm jib so added a second clew point higher up for reaching by attaching two Dyneema strops to the sail, one on each side, held in place with patches of sail cloth glued to the sail with Sikaflex.

On day three I made a trysail from one of my existing damaged sails. I cut the head off, rotating the sail through 90° so the head of the old sail became the new clew. The two loft finished edges became the leech and the foot.

I made a head and tack using Dyneema loops, then repurposed two webbing boom loops to hold them into the new mast. I was able to attach the existing mainsheet to the trysail clew and use the full width traveller. The trysail doubled my speed on certain wind angles – giving me a top speed of 8.4 knots – and allowed me to sail at 70° TWA in lesser sea states.

As an IMOCA is very flat under the waterline it was key to move as much weight forward in the boat as possible. This helped in two ways: when trying to sail to windward it meant the bow was not blown off the wind quite so easily. Secondly, following seas had been pooping the cockpit, often filling it up to knee height. Moving weight forward alleviated this a little. I was also meticulous about closing the valve on the engine exhaust after each time I charged the batteries, to avoid flooding via the exhaust.

I was under jury rig for a total of 13 days, and carried out visual checks to the rig and the deck under the mast step every day. On day nine I was becalmed for 18 hours so I used the opportunity to take the rig down, check all fastenings and the deck before putting the rig back up again. In my final approach to Melbourne I had to sail through 45-knot winds and 6m waves, which I was more confident in having been able to make a good rig check.

I only ran the engine for propulsion for 12 hours – on the night I was becalmed, at low revs to make 3 knots through the water. The rest of the time I kept my fuel reserves for getting into Melbourne, when I knew I might have to navigate through confined areas.

Halfway between Australia and Antarctica there is virtually no passing traffic so the risk of collision was low until I approached the Australian coast. I used a web application to check AIS – this only gives limited data for vessels uploading AIS data via satellite, but is better than nothing. I also hoisted an emergency VHF antenna up the mast to boost my own AIS signal.

Keeping busy

I was genuinely surprised by how busy I could keep myself with optimisation tweaks and boat maintenance.

I guess it’s a state of mind. On a boat, if you chose to be busy there’ll always be something to do. When there were no sails to adapt, I spent time taking an inventory of my leftover food. I serviced my tools. I cleaned. It was important for my mental wellbeing to stay busy and feel like I still had the power to make my own environment better.

During the night hours, I used my excellent Starlink signal (now unencumbered by pesky sails blocking the antenna) to speak with other skippers and call Europe and the US. Overnight I also slept for long stretches, absolutely exhausted in mind and body.

I finally arrived at Port Philip Heads on 27 December and was met by a volunteer crew from the Ocean Racing Club of Victoria. A crew of four on board the 60ft powerboat Little Miss Magic came out to meet me as dusk fell and escorted me overnight towards the tidal entrance of Port Philip, allowing me to get some sleep.

In the morning Little Miss Magic became my pilot boat, guiding me through the Port Philip Heads and into the bay, where the crew passed two jerry cans of diesel and a welcome hamper full of fresh fruit. It took 12 hours to motor across Port Philip Bay, and over the day we formed a small flotilla as various boats came to welcome me and show their support.

Every detail of my arrival to Melbourne City Marina had been organised: customs and immigration were waiting along with a crowd of people assembled on the dock. The shining silver lining in a devastating episode has been the care and kindness shown to me by the sailing community in Melbourne.

The Aftermath

With the boat safely in Melbourne the real hard work now begins to get the team racing again. In the 24 hours immediately after the dismasting I struggled to see my future. Following six years as title sponsor Medallia decided not to renew its contract, so we have the major task of finding a new title sponsor ahead of us. Added to the challenge of recovering from a dismasting far from home this is a huge mountain to move. In my dark moments, it seemed to be a flashing neon sign telling me to give up.

But the unexpected consequence of my ‘slow boat’ journey was the time and space to find hope and energy to stand up and fight again. I started my Vendée Globe campaign with a £25,000 bank loan in late 2018. Over
the intervening six years, we’ve grown to establish a successful and respected ocean racing team, which has forged its way to become one of the top 10 IMOCA teams in Europe – despite being the only team based in the UK, and on a relatively meagre budget.

Ocean racing is my life, my passion and my career.

I know I have much more to give, I have not yet reached my peak performance potential. I’m determined that both my team and I can not only continue to advance and progress at the elite end of this sport, but also make lasting change by diversifying the appeal and reach of a sport that can offer so much to so many people.

It’s not yet time to hang up my boots. We have many more miles left to sail.

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