Girl power

Hannah Jenner tells us about her campaign with Anna-Maria Renken for the Global Ocean Race

Britain’s Hannah Jenner and German Anna-Maria Renken took a step further towards their goal of becoming the sole female Global Ocean Race crew last week when they announced they had secured use of Peter Harding’s Owen Clarke-designed 40 Degrees for this September’s doublehanded lap of the planet.

Previously Jenner and Renken had both been planning their own campaigns, but joined forces in October last year, officially entering the Global Ocean Race shortly before Christmas.

“When we got together in December we said that we wanted to be sailing in March, so it is cool that we are here in March,” Jenner told thedailysail from Pointe à Pitre, where she and Renken have had the boat handed over to them by New Zealander Conrad Colman, who raced her in the Route du Rhum. Coleman had hoped to sail 40 Degrees in the Global Ocean Race himself.

“Conrad has been brilliant with us to be fair, because it can’t have been an easy situation,” admits Jenner. “We went out with him for about four hours today, put in a few tacks, played with the ballast system and went through the big long list of questions that we had. It was really good. The wind was pretty light, but it was enough to get to grips with a few things and feel confident enough that we can set off across the Atlantic and get there in one piece.”

Being of Clipper Round the World Race origin, Jenner, now 30 (seven months older than her co-skipper) says that she had originally wanted to compete in the Velux 5 Oceans, but she had been unable to secure the funding to run a 60 footer. As a result she went back to the drawing board and looked at the more affordable Class 40s, contemplating the Global Ocean Race. 

“My plans changed, because I thought of doing a team entry, with everyone doing a leg each, but as time ticked by there were extra logistics and costs in having a team of people and then I got an email from Anna about an all-girl team.”

Heralding from Surrey, Jenner started sailing properly at university where she frequently raced aboard a Tripp 40 and a Mumm 30. On leaving Southampton University, where she studied English, she decided to have a shot at making sailing her career. She worked for the Challenge Business in 2004 before it went bust, but realised that the fastest way to get to where she wanted was to follow the likes of Mike Golding, Dee Caffari and Alex Thomson and do the Challenge or the Clipper Round the World Race. She became the Clipper Round the World Race’s first female skipper and finished the 2008 event third, aboard Glasgow. She subsequently was roped back into to the last Clipper race when she took over as skipper of the Cork entry.

Jenner has had some involvement with the shorthanded racing circuit. She has spent time on Open 60s – she helped deliver Dee Caffari’s Aviva back from Costa Rica after the Transat Jacques Vabre and sailed with Robin Knox-Johnson aboard his Velux 5 Oceans steed. She has also raced with Katie Miller aboard her Figaro 2 bluQube.

Last autumn Jenner took part in the Artemis Offshore Academy trials. “It was really really interesting, but I talked my way out of it, because I had my own plans and I was committed to what I wanted to do. It was a really interesting experience, but it was hard to tell what they were looking for. It was a fantastic opportunity for me, but I have a mortgage to pay and I can’t not work for three months.”

Originally an avid windsurfer and semi-pro swimmer, Jenner’s Hamburg-based co-skipper Anna Renken, was originally planning to enter the Global Ocean Race as part of an all-female team. She contacted Jenner when her original Norwegian co-skipper dropped out. Previously she has been of part of the increasingly active Scandinavian shorthanded offshore scene –the first German woman to participate in the doublehanded Watski Skagervak 2 Star in Norway last year and she competed in the 2009 Rolex Fastnet Race with a team from Kieler Yacht Club. She has also been the lone female sailor aboard Piet Vroon’s well travelled Tonnerre de Breskens.

According to Jenner she and Renken complement each other well in what is currently the hardest part of their campaign – to raise the necessary funds to make it around the world, and dealing with the emotional rollercoaster as she puts it of “constantly writing letters and people promising stuff and then seeming to disappear off the face of the earth.”

At present they have some private backing from a small investor group that has secured them 40 Degrees (“the arrangement is a little bit interesting, but it is essentially a charter,” says Jenner) and allowed them to get sailing. They have technical partnerships in place, but they are still looking for a campaign budget in the region of 300,000 Euros to compete in the Global Ocean Race.  

“It is not an outrageous sums of money. Compared to a couple of years ago, companies seem to be listening now. They are trying to think of clever ways they are to be able to spend money with you while not appearing to consumers like they are throwing money away.”

On their side is that they will be the race’s only all-female team and thus likely to grab more than their fair share of publicity generated by the event. Coming from two countries effectively doubles their chances of finding backing. “For two girls to be sailing around the world together, in Germany - that is a big deal,” says Jenner. Another bonus of German involvement is that the race is already known there following the win of Boris Herrmann and Felix Oehme in the race’s predecessor, the Portimao Global Ocean Race.

To survive Jenner does yacht deliveries and some motivational speaking while Renken remains in full time employment at the classification society Germanische Lloyds.  

Back to Guadeloupe and Jenner and Renken are setting off this week, to deliver 40 Degrees back to Europe a trip which will double as their Global Ocean Race qualifier. According to Jenner they have to get a letter signed by the harbour master before they leave Guadeloupe stating they are setting sail doublehanded on 40 Degrees and must do the same when they arrive in Horta in the Azores.

Following the Route du Rhum, 40 Degrees is in good shape and when we spoke to Jenner in a bar in Pointe a Pitre, where she and Renken had commandeered all the available power sockets and WiFi bandwidth, they had a short job list including repairing some wear and tear to the running rigging. “The electronics are all in good shape. The sails are good enough for the delivery back. The autopilot works, the electrics and computer work. I am touching lots of wood as I say this because it is probably going to curse the whole situation, but she is pretty much ready to go pretty much.”

The plan is for them to be joined by two media crewman in Horta who will then sail on to the UK with them (no broadband - we’re not going). Once back in Blighty, Jenner says they are likely to base themselves out of Brian Thompson’s new offshore sailing academy at Portsmouth’s Haslar Marina.

Obviously money will dictate their program this year but Jenner says she would ideally like to compete in three Class 40 events – the Normandy Channel Race, the Les Sables-Horta-Les Sables and the Biscay Challenge – to get up to speed prior to the Global Ocean Race.

As to how competitive they expect to be in the doublehanded lap of the planet, this will of course once again depend on finances. Ideally Jenner says they would be training from when they return to the UK, ideally with someone with more experience in the Class 40 than they have.

“We still have a lot of work to do on finances but we were presented with an opportunity to get the boat and if you never take a risk in life you are never going to achieve anything spectacular.”