Pip Hare on the Mini

Pip Hare tells Lucy Fitzgeorge-Parker about the solo class for the next Solent 650, the new Transat course and her new role at the RNLI

For most Mini sailors, the big news of the past few weeks has been the announcement of the final course and dates for next year’s Transat. At a meeting at their home base on 27 October, new French race hosts Douarnenez Courses revealed that the 19th edition of the solo race will start at 1313 hours on 13 October, 2013 and include a stopover in Arrecife, Lanzarote on route to the finish in Guadeloupe.

Yet for top British Mini-ist Pip Hare the more significant announcement came a week later with the release by Classe Mini of the provisional race schedule for 2013 and the news that the second edition of the Solent 650 will be open to solo as well as doublehanded entrants.

“It’s brilliant, it’s an absolute coup,” says Hare. “It means that in future UK sailors could, over a two-year period, qualify for the Mini Transat without leaving British waters, which makes a huge difference.”

Classe Mini rules require entrants for Category A contests – which includes the Les Sables-Azores-Les Sables race as well as the Mini Transat – to have completed 1,000nm of racing in their boats, including a singlehanded race and one with a leg of more than 500nm.

With the addition of a solo class for the 290nm Solent 650, itself a feeder for the Royal Western YC's 565nm UK Mini Fastnet, UK Mini sailors will for the first time be able to satisfy this requirement without having to compete on the continent.

There are also signs that the new solo Solent 650 could attract a sizeable non-British contingent. Race organiser Keith Willis reports that following the announcement the race website has received more hits from the Netherlands than from the UK.

Hare adds that she expects considerable interest in the new class from French Ministes, given how favourably the course for the Solent 650 – which starts from Lymington and rounds the Isle of Wight before heading out to Wolf Rock and back to Plymouth – compares with the two solo races on the French Atlantic coast, the Pornichet Select (“a notorious boat-breaker”) and the Trophee Marie-Agnes Peron (MAP).

“The Solent 650 course is every bit as demanding as the course for the Select,” she says. “You’ve got a succession of tidal gates all the way down the coast, and even just getting round the Isle of Wight at the start is massively tactical. That means there are plenty of opportunities for reshuffling the fleet and gaining ground by using your brains, and that’s what makes for a good race.”

In other good news for UK Mini sailors, the class association has indicated that the recent dispensation granted to proto designer and builder Jake Jefferis to start his 1,000NM solo passage – the other key Cat A qualifier – from the Solent, rather than having to slot into one of the standard routes in the Atlantic or Mediterranean, would likely be repeated for other UK applicants.

And the growing UK Mini community will continue to benefit in 2013 from the invaluable input of the Artemis Offshore Academy, which has confirmed that it will once again run a series of free training weekends in the Solent in the spring. The Academy are again fielding a Mini entry aiming at the Transat to be sailed by Nikki Curwen (daughter of Mini legend, Simon...)

Dates have yet to be confirmed but an Academy representative said the sessions would likely be in the second half of February running into March. Coaching will be undertaken by some of the UK’s most experienced Mini sailors, including Hare, Willis, Becky Scott and Nick Bubb, as well as RYA race coach Mike Hart.

“Next year is going to be a very busy one for me but I’m happy to make time to help out with Artemis’s training,” says Hare. “To offer that sort of opportunity for free to Mini sailors is fantastic, and along with the other developments will really help to build the Mini community in the UK.”

Hare will indeed be a key part of that community in 2013 thanks to her recent appointment as the RNLI’s coastal safety product manager for marine leisure, which will see her based in Poole from the New Year.

The newly created role will involve identifying ways to target the organisation’s key safety messages more effectively to both racing and cruising sailors, a task ideally suited to Hare’s broad-based sailing credentials. As well as a seasoned solo racer – she finished 15th overall in her first solo ocean race, the 2009 OSTAR, placed first in her class the following year in the Round Britain and Ireland Race, and was 17th in last year’s Mini Transat – she is also a certified Yachtmaster Examiner and RYA keelboat racing coach.

She is also known on the Mini circuit as a famously tough sailor, a reputation that is reinforced by her reaction to last year’s announcement of the change of course for the Transat that will see the 4,020NM race finish in the Caribbean rather than, as in 2011, in Brazil.

“Not going through the Doldrums definitely takes an element out of the course,” she says. “On the old route you’d have a run in the trades and then, just as your boat was starting to suffer a bit and you were starting to get tired, you’d get to the Doldrums and have to start beating again. It was like hitting the wall in a marathon.

“The route to Brazil was hard, extraordinarily hard in fact, but that’s why I liked it – although I have to admit I was in a very small minority!”

Hare adds that the likely necessity of adding a gate at the Cape Verdes to keep the fleet together and avoid over-extending the support boats would also make the race less challenging. “Again, when we were crossing the Doldrums everyone had to choose their point to cross, and if you chose wrong you could go from first to last, which made it much more interesting strategically,” she says.

“If everyone trucks down to the Cape Verdes and turn around the same island, tactically it’s a lot less involved.”

She is unreservedly enthusiastic, however, about the substitution of Lanzarote for the previous stopover point, Madeira. “It’s great to extend the first leg a bit more,” she says. “It means that by the time the boats leave the Canaries, which will in any case be a bit later than last time, they’ll be leaving into the trades proper.”

The change of course has sparked fierce debate in the Mini community about whether the new, more downwind route will favour third generation series boats such as the Nacira, Argo and RG650 over the Pogo 2, which has swept the board in all categories of Mini races over the past six years.

“The ante has been upped for both the Pogos and the Naciras, as the best-established of the older and newer generation designs,” says Hare. “The Pogo 2 is a brilliant boat and there are some awesome sailors in the class such as Renaud Mary and Clement Bouyssou, but with Justine Mettraux and Damien Cloarec we’re now starting to see some really good sailors in the Naciras, which we didn't have before.

“I definitely don’t think it’s going to be a runaway win for the Naciras but whereas nine out of 10 of the top series boats in the last Transat were Pogo 2s, this time it might be more like five. It doesn’t mean that Pogo 2 is dead but it is getting on for 10 years old now, so it’s time another design took over.”

Another consequence of the rise of the new generation boats, according to Hare, will likely be increased competition for Transat slots in the series class – particularly when combined with the potentially less demanding course and restricted funding for proto development.

“The series class is definitely where it’s at right now,” she says. “It’s a shame, because the proto class is so important for the development of not just Minis but all ocean racing boats, but people just don’t have the cash at the moment to race protos so the competition has moved to the series class. I think it’s going to be very hard to get an entry in the race this year.”

Entry for the Transat will officially open at Classe Mini’s AGM at the Paris Salon Nautique on December 8. For more details go to www.classemini.com and for more information on the Solent 650 visit http://ukmini650.wordpress.com/.