What Offshore Racing Knows About Pressure
Photo credit: James Tomlinson / Pip Hare Ocean Racing
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Pip Hare did not grow up near the sea. She grew up in Huntingdon, in the flat middle of Cambridgeshire, about as far from the coast as England allows. The ocean, as a place you could actually go and do something in, was someone else’s world. Her grandfather’s world, as it happened. When the family visited him on holiday, she and the other kids would pile into his little wooden boat and spend the afternoon jumping off the side into the water. It was fun. It was not yet sailing.
That all changed at 16, when she joined a youth sailing holiday. She remembers why it hooked her with unusual clarity. “When you’re a teenager people are telling you to behave like an adult, take responsibility, but you can’t drive, you can’t vote. You’re restricted in so many ways.” Offshore sailing, she discovered, was the opposite of that. It gave her something she hadn’t felt before: genuine agency. And then she looked out at an empty horizon for the first time and thought about what was on the other side of it. “I could get there in this boat,” she remembers thinking. “That just really, really excited me.”
Three decades later, Hare is one of Britain’s most accomplished solo offshore sailors, having competed in the Vendée Globe, the non-stop, unassisted solo race around the world — and a full programme of oceanic racing that takes her thousands of miles from shore, alone, on a boat 18 metres long with a mast reaching 30 metres into the sky. She is, by any measure, someone who has learned to operate under immense pressure.
The idea behind this conversation was simple. What do safety-critical environments have in common with sailing? How does a person make decisions under pressure when there is zero margin for error? How do they manage fatigue, stay sharp, and know when their own thinking has gone wrong? And who better to ask than someone who has been doing all of that, alone, thousands of miles from help, for their entire adult life?
The Sea: An Environment That Doesn’t Sit Still
Offshore racing is, as Hare describes it, a place of constant change where nothing ever stays the same. “You’re completely immersed in a natural environment,” she says. “You look for patterns in weather forecasts, in conditions you’ve seen before but you never know everything about the natural world. You’ve never seen it all.”
The sea can present 13-metre waves. It can also go glassy calm, the surface like silk, the clouds reflecting back up at you. Both happen. Sometimes the switch between them comes without warning. “No two days are the same,” she says. “It can go from calm to chaos in a moment.”
Building for Resilience, Not Just Performance
Before she ever leaves the dock, Hare has already thought about what is going to break.
This is not pessimism. It is, she explains, the only rational approach to a race across the Atlantic (around 10 days) or around the world (two to three months), where you could be thousands of miles from anyone who might help you. “You prepare your boat like a Formula One team prepares their car,” she says. “You test and test and make it as light and as fast as possible. But the critical difference is that we must also prepare for the failure of everything.”
You prepare your boat like a Formula One team prepares their car. You test and test and make it as light and as fast as possible. But the critical difference is that we must also prepare for the failure of everything.
The boat she races requires a team of seven or eight technicians to maintain when it’s ashore. Some jobs need multiple people just to manage the physical load. Hare has to work out, in advance, how she would do each of those jobs alone, at sea, on a moving boat. She has climbed her own 30-metre mast while racing. She once replaced a rudder — a task that normally requires the boat out of water and four people — floating between storms in the Southern Ocean, by herself. “It’s only possible through preparation,” she says. “Gathering as much intelligence and experience from every race that has happened before. Building a database of failure.”
It’s only possible through preparation. Gathering as much intelligence and experience from every race that has happened before. Building a database of failure.
That database is what gives her confidence. Hare is aware she might not finish because of a failure she can’t fix. But “we’ve trained, we’ve planned, we’ve mitigated so much, that when I leave, I have this huge confidence that if it is possible to fix it, I will fix it,” she said.
That mindset will feel familiar to anyone in aviation, for instance. Confidence comes not from assuming nothing will go wrong but from knowing, in specific, tested, documented detail that you know what to do when it does.
Managing the Unexpected in Real Time
In one race, the motor driving the hydraulic ram that moves the keel failed mid-ocean. The keel is the only component on the boat powered by anything other than human effort. Without it working, the boat’s balance is compromised.
Hare had a spare relay on board. She diagnosed the fault remotely with her technical team on shore, replaced the part, and the system still didn’t work. What followed was four hours of methodical diagnosis conducted via satellite link, in the middle of the night, while racing at 30 miles an hour — her team eventually bringing in the component’s manufacturer to help trace the fault.
The culprit, in the end, was a tiny diode, an electrical component, in the new relay, soldered in backwards at the factory.
“We never considered,” she says, “that a manufactured component could be that wrong.” The lesson was immediate and practical: every spare part will now be tested before it’s vacuum-packed and stored on board.
This issue, mundane-sounding as the technical fault is, reveals something important about how Hare operates. It is structured, checking every single thing, in order, without skipping steps. Knowing that the answer was somewhere in the logic of the system and working through until they found it.
In Crisis, Emotion Has No Role
There are moments, though, that no amount of preparation can make routine. At a key event, Hare experienced a dismasting at a race she had spent four years building towards.
She was in the cockpit, looking at data screens, when a sound made her look up. The mast was already falling towards her. “These are all split-second,” she says. “The time it takes for the noise to reach my ears, for me to look up.”
She pauses here. “I never felt in danger. I wasn’t fearful for my life. But I knew my race was over. And the devastation is immense. It’s not something I’m ever going to get over.”
When you are that distressed, she says, everything in you wants to stop. To let go. But there is no one else. Nobody is going to sort it out. So she called her team.
The first question they asked was not “how are you feeling?” It was “are you okay?” meaning, physically hurt. The answer was no. And then, immediately, they were in what she calls “transactional business.” Is the hull damaged? Is the boat in danger? What is the weather?
“I know that there are moments where emotion doesn’t belong,” she says. “So you revert to your business language, which is very transactional and informational. My job is to give them correct information. Their job is to support me. In that moment, the only thing that matters is making sure the situation doesn’t escalate.”
I know that there are moments where emotion doesn’t belong. So you revert to your business language, which is very transactional and informational. My job is to give them correct information. Their job is to support me. In that moment, the only thing that matters is making sure the situation doesn’t escalate.
What followed was three to four hours of practical work: cutting away the rigging, salvaging what she could, building a small temporary mast from wreckage, and beginning the slow sail towards Australia. During those hours, she found herself almost singing quietly to herself. She had put the emotion so completely to one side that she was simply working, competently, through the problem. And only then, she says, only when the situation was contained and she was safe — did she allow the emotion back in.
Fatigue: The Invisible Constraint
In the shorter races, Hare does not sleep for more than 20 to 30 minutes at a stretch when conditions demand constant attention. The logic is: short naps keep her in light or REM sleep, meaning she can be alert within seconds.
“You become brutally self-aware,” she says. “Constantly asking yourself: what is the most important thing I can do for my performance right now? Trim the sails or sleep for half an hour?” Before any significant tactical decision, she sleeps first. “I’ve made some terrible decisions while tired. That’s learned through bitter experience.”
You become brutally self-aware, constantly asking yourself: what is the most important thing I can do for my performance right now? Trim the sails or sleep for half an hour? I’ve made some terrible decisions while tired. That’s learned through bitter experience.
But how do you know when you’re too tired to decide? Hare has a test. She picks two numbers, say,132 and 74, and tries to subtract one from the other in her head. If she can’t do it, she doesn’t make the call.
She learned this from ultra running, which she took up in 2007 after completing her first marathon. On long runs without a smart watch, she calculated her pace splits manually. When she found she couldn’t do the arithmetic, she knew she needed to eat or drink. The principle transferred directly. “With sailing, it’s eat, drink, or sleep,” she says. “The same signal, the same response.”
If Hare’s approach is rooted in experience, in air traffic control that same question is becoming measurable through eye tracking. By measuring where controllers look, for how long and how their visual scan changes over time, researchers can catch the moment before performance is impacted.
How to Determine What Matters Most
When asked what lesson from all of this translates most directly to other safety-critical environments, Hare answers without hesitation. Prioritisation.
She uses a system. At sea, when faced with more tasks than time, she categorises everything into three questions, in order: Am I safe? Am I going in the right direction? Am I going as fast as I can?
Pip at the Vendee Globe Finish
Safety comes first. That includes the physical — is there a storm ahead, am I hurt, am I too tired to operate — but also the tactical. Is someone closing on me so fast that I need to act now? Only once safety is addressed does she ask about direction. And only when direction is confirmed does she ask about speed, about performance, about the value-add tasks.
“There’s no point sailing fast in the wrong direction,” she says. It is an obvious observation. It is also the kind of thing that gets forgotten under pressure, when momentum and adrenaline make action feel productive regardless of where it’s pointed.
There’s no point sailing fast in the wrong direction. It is an obvious observation. It is also the kind of thing that gets forgotten under pressure.